We both awoke this morning with the same conclusion - we should skip our second night here in Lesina and bike to Foggia today instead. That will give us the most flexibility - if we can’t find help in Foggia, we can catch the train to Salerno the next day - a larger city with several credible sounding bike stores listed. The sooner we find out what’s up with Rachael’s bike the better, so we can start making alternate plans if necessary.
And anyway, after yesterday’s great show, how much else can we hope to find in Lesina? We’ve already seen much more than we hoped for.
We’re booked here for two nights, but fortunately once we explain the situation (using Google Translate), we’re let out of our second night. We pack up, hop into the elevator, and some time later arrive at the ground floor.
I don’t think I’ve ever slept under a brick ceiling before. For some reason I don’t find it comforting. I wonder how they fare in earthquakes?
It’s a quite easy ride to Foggia today. Save for a small 500’ ridge, it’s flat the entire way. We’ve picked a good route - a few miles out of Lesina we turn off onto a very quiet road and spend most of the next thirty miles breezing through flat, treeless farmland. It feels like we’re in the Great Plains, except for the formations rising in the distance.
With a tailwind especially, it’s a very pleasant ride - but hot. There’s been a real change in the weather, and suddenly it feels like summer - it’s 80F when we arrive at our hotel, and we’re happy to get out of the sun. We’re greeted on the street when we bike up - they’re waiting for us, and know we’re coming with bikes. The lady of the house beckons us to roll the bikes in and just lean them carefully against the sofa in the lounge.
The first few miles of the ride are completely flat. Brakes not required.
The top of the ridge is almost wholly given over to limestone quarries. There must be a half dozen of them up here. Every few minutes a lorry drives past with a few huge blocks filling its bed.
Rachael’s gotten a bit ahead, but I catch up with her by the side of the road, waiting for roadside assistance. One of the bolts attaching the rear rack has worked free, but fortunately hasn’t fallen out. A curious audience watches as we deal with the situation.
The bike store won’t open for the afternoon for awhile, so we lie around in our room cooling off and guzzling cold water. At 4:30 I head for the bike store on Rachael’s bike, taking one for the team so she can take a nap and catch up on some missed sleep. I’ve mapped out a three mile triangle: first to the bike store; then to the train station; and then back to the hotel. The idea is that if we can’t get the bike serviced we’ll take the morning train to Salerno, so I want to check the schedule and possibly get tickets depending on what happens.
What happens is unexpected. When I reach the bike store and find its open, I stop first to maladjust the brakes again so that the symptom will be obvious when I take the bike in. However, I can’t recreate the problem; and in my effort to do so I somehow end up adjusting the brake so that it works excellently. As I indicated in the comments a few posts back, we’ve concluded that the brake must have gotten some abrasive junk lodged in it. Somewhere over the last 40 miles of riding it must have worked clear. In fact, Rachael now thinks that it was probably fine by the time we reached Lesina last night, if we’d had the imagination to test it out then.
By the time I make it back to the room and shower, it’s about time for dinner. We had never planned to stay in Foggia at all - we thought we’d just bike in and catch the train from here. Now that we’re here though, we’re surprised by how appealing it is. I wish we’d allowed some time to look around, other than what we saw on the way to and from dinner.
We have a new metric for excellence in service. My espresso after tonight’s meal was a four sweetener: white, brown, artificial, and fruit. A new record!
Foggia’s favorite son is the composer Umberto Giordano. A large plaza is named after him, and features statues of figures from his best known operas. Here, we have Marcella (on the left) and Andrea Chenier.
4 years ago