Day 4: Orte Scalo to Lago di Corbara

September 10, 2023

It ain't easy being green

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I've got some catching up to do here, due to lack of wifi yesterday. Let's cut to the chase.

Between early starts and careful timing of the day's climbs, we're learning to keep ourselves out of the danger zone (another potential soundtrack for yesterday's journal entry). We've added this question to our checkin checklist: we must leave by 7am, so how can we make this work? This usually involves receiving extra instructions on how to open a gate that's usually closed until 8am or whenever.

So today we were in fact on the road at 7am. Being Sunday, the streets were empty, so we were making good progress. That is, until we realized we still had the room key with us! That cost us a few minutes more. It could have been so much worse.

If you've read any of our prior Europe journals, you might remember that I call this day of the week "the Sunday trap". We're still in the process of figuring out Italy's take on things. I get the impression that, among Christians, Protestants are more hung up with honoring the sabbath than Catholics are. A lot of places here are still closed on Sundays, but you'll find enterprising people keeping their shops open half days or even full days. That's good for us. We vowed to stop at the first place we could grab a macchiato and a cornetto, and thankfully it didn't take long to find one.

This place was very busy with what looked like groups of friends gathering to go on outings together

Now that we had eaten up more precious time, we had to push ahead on varied surfaces in order to reach our big climb of the day.

There was rutted asphalt:

Fresh pavement:

...and gravel:

We didn't stop for photos until we reached the town of Penna In Teverina at the summit. It's a cute enough place. Like most places we ride through, I feel like we missed some interesting and important stuff. I didn't do nearly enough research in this regard.

Gravity once again whisked us back down to the autostrada, where we soon found ourselves in Attigliano, my original, overly-ambitious destination for yesterday's ride. It was only 11:30, but we were famished, so we looked for a pizzeria that may have been the only game in town. Not only were they open, but their food was delicious. They even had cold Gatorade! (not our usual thing, but it seems we really benefit from it on long, hot days in the saddle).

We were soon back on the road. Our destination for today was originally Orvieto Scalo, but at the last minute we decided to head over to a campground on the shore of Lago di Corbera that I had scouted out as a kind of backup plan. It was about 4km off the EV7 route. Pretty reasonable as far as side trips are concerned.

The town of Baschi, which we bypassed. It's tiny but it looks pretty neat.

We arrived around 2:30. It took a while to get checked in, and we decided to share a beer and go for a swim in the pool before setting up camp. We've never actually taken advantage of a campground pool before. It was very refreshing! Anyway, we haven't gotten the hang of setting up this new tent yet, so that took a while too.

We've got this section of the campground all to ourselves. I choose a spot under a fig tree, which turns out to be a slight mistake, as the figs on the ground are quite messy.

The tent looks so massive! However, half of it is vestibule. It's great to be able to keep all our stuff enclosed in it.

Camping us usually a "let's save a few bucks on this vacation" affair for us. But today, with no campstove fuel and no camp dinner ingredients, we decided to splurge and eat at the campground restaurant. It was pretty nice. It felt a lot like glamping. We've always made light fun of all the amenities available at European commercial campgrounds, but now I'm starting to get it.

Camping reminds me of how we're drawn to bike touring as a form of ecotourism. By flying to Europe and then buying a bunch of packaged food and bottled drinks, we're not doing it right at all. Our 2020 tour was by far our most environmentally friendly, and nothing's going to compete with that. Maybe next time we need to get over here by kayak or something.

Today's ride: 57 km (35 miles)
Total: 229 km (142 miles)

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