Today’s fabulous ride, or at least the GPS track for it, came from Jacquie Gaudet during her 2022 tour of northern Italy. She in turn said that she got the route from … you guessed it .. TA.
So here we go with at least a third telling of this lovely ride.
I’m several days behind on bloggity blog blogging, and I’ve captioned the pic’s pretty well, so I’ll keep this short ….
A great ride under almost ideal conditions, a few degrees cooler would have been great though. Two thirds of the ride, from Cannobio to Losone (just before Locarno) was textbook perfect riding … great scenery, great roads, almost no traffic, a good but not shattering workout climbing followed by ultra creamy downhills through beautiful terrain. The last third of the ride was a little bit of payback as we were stuck on the only road, right along the lakeside, between Locarno and Cannobio. It was ok to ride and 99% of the vehicles were fine ( but it takes less thats 1% to take out a cyclist .. and there were a few of those!). Life can’t be perfect.
We’ve really enjoyed Cannobio and I wouldn’t be surprised if we come back here again some day, and this time of year seems to be about perfect.
Even though we were riding unloaded, when we saw the resident turtles out on the lawn of B&B 21, we saw that as an ominous premonition of what our average speed was going to be (yet again) today
We started with a good but unrelenting ~800 m climb up the Cannobino river gorge. It was very tight and very tree covered. Beautiful to ride in but limiting for pictures. There were many waterfalls and glimpses of the river running its course, and I managed to grab a few pics
Of course k was waiting for me several times. One waiting spot had a little roadside ‘public library’ where she spotted this old NG with an article about Vancouver!
And here we are. Not an official pass I don’t think, but there’s apparently a ‘journal’ dedicated to Italian Cycling legend Marco Pantani that you can sign. Given that I had to look up who Pantani was, it would have been fatuous for us to sign it
Cool fountain in Malesco. JG commented on it 3 years ago and was lamenting that it wasn’t working. I don’t think it has over the intervening period either
Although we could get cold drinks in Malesco, there was nowhere to get food. We fixed that a few km’s down the road in Re where we found a nice trattoria for ravioli and risotto. No food pics, just a nice shot of the bikes having a rest while we ate.
The massive cathedral in Re just down the street from our lunch spot. There is an old (15th century) and much smaller church attached to this behemoth that was completed in 1952. The old church is quite nice, the new one is …. Big. I’ll leave it at that
The river formed the border between Italy (west side) and Switzerland (east side) for a few km’s, however we’re just about to cross over in Switzerland (again!) where they’ve got the whole river
Very pretty and narrow gorge. When we looked at our maps prior to this ride, we saw many cable car’s shown all along the valley. We thought that this would be a long ski resort strung out along the valley …. Big mistake!.
There were a ton of cable cars, but just about all of them were small ones like this that were used to supply houses either in the giver gorge or higher up the slopes where there were no roads. We saw a couple of these in use today.
After all this fun river gorge riding we popped out into Locarno near the north end of Lake Maggiore. It’s a pretty high end place in Switzerland . Right along the lake shore (here its technically Ancona, a town adjacent to Locarno) there are 6 Michelin rated restaurants … a couple of them with multiple stars. Not today!
We’ve got 15 km’s of flat lake riding (with a lot of late afternoon traffic!) to get us back to Cannobio. We did have a pretty good tailwind to help us along. Let’s get going!
Lyle McLeodTo Jacquie GaudetIt’s a burrata….. just four ingredients, tomato sauce that’s added before it’s baked, then proccuitto, a whole burrata and basil is added once baked. I make this quite often at home, and this one was ok, but mine if far better IMHO (this one needs much more basil). I’ll send you an email with a pic of mine. Reply to this comment 3 days ago
When I saw the young boy marching across the waterfront plaza this song just popped into my head … and given we’ve been crossing back and forth between Italy and Switzerland without seeming to even notice over the last couple of days … well here it is.
Games without Frontiers by Peter Gabriel
Let’s just make sure we can still continue to play games without frontiers.
A very sweaty good night from Cannobio … with a refreshing post ride frizzante supplied by our B&B hosts
Today's ride: 69 km (43 miles) Total: 2,622 km (1,628 miles)
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Scott AndersonI wondered if you might take this loop. It's one I've thought back on many times. Thanks for giving me an excuse to go back and refresh my memory. Reply to this comment 3 days ago
