Northern Italy

Northern Italy has been incredible but i am already starting to feel the heat during the day. Its so lucky we are not going through Turkey during the summer!

We made our through the Alps towards Lake Como, which is incredibly beautiful. I saw villa for sale at €40,000, so if anyone wants to split the bill i am up for it. Its just on the Swiss/Italian border and it looks pretty damn good!

The food and accomodation were much cheaper and we got into the habbit of double meal. Double meal is essentially a whole pizza followed by a kebab chaser. Even after this I still feel abit hungry in the morning, luckily there is plenty of dainty pastries and coffee availble in the morning.

We made our way through some of the bigger towns in northern Italy such as, Bergamo, Brescia, Verona and Viscencia. the cycling was much easier as most of the terrain was flat but the roads were much busier and I had to listen to music to distract myself from the noise of traffic on some roads.

A few highlights include, stopping at a Hong Kong bar and having a few drinks whilst Vito found out where was best to stay, the bar owner suggested the local park, but this looked a little dodgy so we moved on.

Just as we were about to give up and try and find the nearest Hotel, a guy called Simione cycled past us and asked if we wanted to camp in his parents backgarden! We stayed there and had breakfast with him in the morning whilst he worked out a quiet route to Treviso. He showed us a route that was on a cycle path along an old disused railway directly from Viscenza to Treviso for 40k. Sadly, I think the Bristol to Bath cycle path may come second in this instance. Simione said he wanted to help us as he loved bikes and was interested in where we were going. He had a collection of 14-16? bikes, all with Brookes sadles. He said that Brookes sadles used to be made in Viscenza which was pretty interesting. He also turned oit to be a journalist and said he wanted to write a story about us for the paper, which was pretty cool.

Another highlight was meeting the Italian equiviliant of Josh Newton. We went to a small village bar for linch and were greeted by a giy who was fairly inebriated by at midday. We only meant to stay for an hour whilst we ate but he kept buying us drinks and tried to pursuade us to keep drinking with him….We eventually left after another four hours or so.

I learnt some pretty cool drinking rules. From what I gathered there were two main rules.

1. Drinking is like farming, you must have a tractor and trailor e.g. one type of drink in one hand and a different one in another.

2. You can only finish drinking shots on an odd number, but ypu must always try to get to an even number. I understood the concept but not how it works in practise, essentially you end up drinking alot.

He was determined to make us stay for the frog and fish festival in a couple of days time, but we made our excuses and left after a couple shots. It would have been a good night but its probably just as well, there was no way I could keep up with him.

After one or two drinks, the Slovenian border was not too far away. Oh an we also saw a pretty sweet boxing match on the border. These were pretty tough dudes, don’t mess.