Yes, we’re aware of the calendar.  This is not an April Fool’s joke.

This could be a quite lengthy post or a short one, but we’ll keep it on the brief side for the sake of simplicity.  We’re radically remodeling the tour, starting tomorrow.  Gone are most of the rest of Sicily, and gone too is Basilicata - roughly the whole next month of the plan.  In its place are longer stays in Puglia and in the north.

If you’re generally familiar with the geography of southern Italy, you know that this is represents a significant simplification to the tour.  Circling Mount Etna and crossing Basilicata were the most physically challenging parts of the overall plan, but they’re out.  And really that’s the primary driver behind this, though not the only one.

One thing left out of yesterday’s post was the fact that I had another significant arrythmia episode on that final climb back to Caltagirone.  Disappointing and discouraging, because I’ve had a clean 11 day streak since that episode on the way to Castellammare.  It’s disruptive, leaves me anxious and feeling insecure when facing a vertically challenging day, and makes it harder to fully appreciate some of the aspects of Sicily that we’ve so loved in the past.  We’re lucky enough to have the flexibility to be able to shift gears fairly easily so we might as well make things easier on ourselves.

So that’s the main thing.  It hasn’t helped that we’ve both been dealing with gastrointestinal issues.  Yes, we know that this too shall pass, but it’s taken an edge off the experience. They’ve especially bothered Rachael, who’s typically immune to this.  It’s been a full week and her system still isn’t quite normal.

And then, there’s one other thing.  Sicily is a challenging destination, and we’ve both come around to realizing that it was a mistake to have come back a third time - particularly when we’re four years older and slower.  

So what’s the new plan?  We’re still piecing it together, but we know how it starts.  Tomorrow we’ll bike to Ragusa as our last riding day in Sicily.  After that we’re going to take the train to Taranto, with an overnight in Syracuse and a three day break at Scalea on the Tyrrhenian Sea on our way getting there.  That’s probably enough to reveal for now, along with the fact that we’re both very enthusiastic and excited about the change.

Rachel and Patrick, this obviously means we’re not meeting up with you in Patti after all.  Rats!!  This is the one thing we’re most disappointed about with this change in plans.  We’ll be keeping a close eye on your itinerary though and it’s still possible we could cross paths in Puglia.

Suzanne and Janos, in case you wondered this doesn’t affect our plans for the tail end of the tour at all. We’ll still be looking around for you two when we land in Riva de Garda in June.

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There’s a lot of work involved in making a change like this on such short notice.  It takes up a lot of think time going through the pros and cons, tossing out alternatives, and settling on a new plan.  And then there’s the work of figuring out the logistics - what trains to catch, which ones take bikes, which have tickets available.  We spent a lot of time working out the train plan, including a fruitless walk to and from the Caltagirone station to see if we could take bikes on the train because we couldn’t tell for sure from the Trenitalia website - fruitless, because the folks at the station just shrugged their shoulders when we asked.  

And of course there’s the Booking aspect - we’ll be cancelling outright or changing dates on nearly two months of bookings by the time we’re done, as well as finding new ones for the added destinations.  We’re lucky (well, not exactly lucky because we always plan with this sort of thing in mind) that only one of our bookings was uncancellable.

So, no bike ride today.  Other than that walk to the train station we were pretty much housebound all day.  Talk, talk, talk.  Scribble, scribble, scribble.

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Steve Miller/GrampiesFor one mad moment Dodie thought maybe Rachael had taken up quilting as an off bike activity.
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1 year ago

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Some pics from our walk to the train station of the ceramics lining Via Roma along the public gardens:

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Susan CarpenterIt’s probably a good thing Rachael doesn’t have any purple paint to make the stone mural a near identical match to her new shirt
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1 year ago

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