We leave for our spring tour exactly two months from today.  It’s a gray, rainy day here in Tucson and I’m housebound for a few days waiting to recover from a persistent cough anyway, so what better time to crack open the next book?  We’ll just take a quick peek to see what the future promises, and then slam the cover shut again and get back to enjoying some fine desert weather conditions once they return.

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I gave a brief preview of our plans for the coming year two weeks ago, on New Year’s Day.  There have been no significant changes at all to the plans for the spring tour since then, so I’ll save some work and just scrape some text forward to put it in context here:

We’re going back to Italy!  We bought our tickets months ago: on March 15th we leave for Palermo, and fly home from Bologna on June 13th when our time in the Schengen Zone runs out.  We’re not biking the whole way though.  It’s planned as a three part journey connected by shortish train rides.   Each of the parts is roughly a month long: 

• Starting in Sicily, we’ll bike from Palermo to Messina and then ferry across strait to Scilla, in Calabria.  This section is well defined, with nearly all of the lodging identified and booked.  Not that a few bookings here won’t get cancelled along the way due to unforeseen events.
• After taking the train from Scilla to Cosenza we’ll bike across Basilicata and Puglia, ending on the Adriatic coast in Termoli.  We have a detailed plan with proposed daily stages, but it’s really dreamware at this point.  Nothing is booked, and there’s plenty of slop in the schedule for us to rethink the plan along the way.
• From Termoli we plan to take the train up the coast to Pesaro, a town we fell in love with two years ago and are excited to see again.  From there we’ll carve a horseshoe out of northeast Italy, turning back south at Trento and ending in Rovigo where we’ll catch a train to Bologna.  With any luck, our suitcases will be there when we arrive this time.

Sicily

This will be our third visit to Sicily, one of our favorite places in Europe.  As with the other two times we’re coming in the spring again, particularly so we can hope to enjoy the the amazing wildflower displays such as we’ve seen in the past.  

This first section of the tour is as settled as any of our tours is lately: we’ve booked the entire route through Sicily except for the last two days, where we lost steam on the booking front for no obvious reason.  Our thinking was to book the entire month as insurance to get us through Easter so we don’t risk getting caught short somewhere.  As always though, we’ll maintain a flexible attitude and change plans here and there in response to weather, mechanical or other issues.

We’ll note here too that we’re hoping/expecting one or more CycleBlazer meetups this time.  In a surprising coincidence, Jacquie and Al are not only coming here this Spring also, but are scheduled to land in Palermo on exactly the same day!  What are the odds?  I’m sure we’ll bump into each other in Palermo at the start, but it wouldn’t be surprising if our paths cross down the road somewhere.  Also, Racpat will pass through Sicily on their way from Morocco to Holland.  They don’t plan on arriving in Palermo until April 8th; but they’re much younger and speedier than Team Anderson so it won’t be a shocker if they catch up with us before we see the Strait of Messina.

Here’s our plan in detail with a rough calendar: Palermo, March 16th; Sciacca, March 24th; Caltagirone, March 30th; Syracusa, April 10th; Messina, April 18th.

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Rachel and Patrick HugensHi! We arrive in Palermo April 9 (yes Easter) and you will be in Syracuse. We are debating how long to stay in Sicily or to hurry through and spend more time in the Balkans so we may very well merge our routes in Messina!
Racpat
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1 year ago

Rachel and Patrick HugensHow do you create these maps separate from the Ride GPS?
And love that you go to Italy and start on the Ides of March!
Racpat
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1 year ago

Scott AndersonTo Rachel and Patrick HugensI can’t believe it didn’t occur to me that we’ll be flying on the Ides of March (we arrive on the 16th), but that’s not too auspicious, is it? And I was a Latin Club officer back in high school!

The map was generated from RideWithGPS, and then I snapped an image of it. I created an Event for Sicily, loaded all of the individual stages into it, and then used its function to display all the routes on one map. Each colored segment is a distinct route. Here’s the event:
https://ridewithgps.com/events/195785-it23a-sicily
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1 year ago

Rachel and Patrick HugensTo Scott AndersonOk non technical Rachel here, how to "snap an image"? And to create an Event, do you have to have a different account to Ride GPS?
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1 year ago

Scott AndersonTo Rachel and Patrick HugensI don’t believe you need a subscription to create events on RideWithGPS. Let me know (through email, probably) if you want me to coach you through it.

I use an iPad, and one of its options is to save a screen print as a photo image.
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1 year ago

Rachel and Patrick HugensCounting down to our rendezvous you guys! Looks like we will just miss meeting up with Susan Carpenter. On past tours we had more flexibility in the schedule to have been able to make the meeting her.
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1 year ago

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Basilicata and Puglia

Our traverse across southern Italy from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Adriatic is probably the most susceptible to revision.  Basilicata is beautiful but mountainous and quite rugged, so there’s more chance that we’ll be affected by weather and terrain challenges.  We haven’t booked anything at all here, but we do have a detailed planned itinerary.  It includes a lot of schedule slop with 11 layover days in four weeks, so odds are pretty good that we’ll stick to the general outline.

Also, there are possibilities for CycleBlaze meetups here as well.  If Racpat didn’t blow past us in Sicily, they might meet us somewhere here in their race across the big boot on their way to Bari and the ferry to Albania.  Plus, there’s another couple we know that will be on the move through here in the same timeframe, so we’ll have our eyes out for them too.  We’ll conceal their identities for now though so as to not spoil their surprise when they announce their plans.

The tentative calendar: Cosenza, April 19th; Matera, May 1st; Manfredonia, May 10th; Termoli, May 19th.

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The North

The last third of the year tour is in the same state as the second at this point - detailed out but completely unbooked.  I’m pretty sure we’ll start looking at booking the back end of it before long though, since we’re locked in at the end anyway by our flight home from Bologna, and because we’re edging into high season and might start finding competition for rooms.   Then, who knows?  Someone might show up and join us along the way.

The tentative calendar: Pesaro, May 20th; Ferrara, May 27; Trento, June 5th; Bologna, June 11th.

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