Reflections: About the tour - Our tour of Sicily - CycleBlaze

May 27, 2016

Reflections: About the tour

From the perspective of the tour itself, this one went about as well as we could have hoped for. First, some statistics:
28 days cycling, 2 rest days, 5 days traveling and in Palermo
1,343 cycling miles
109,500 feet total elevation gain
Average day: 48 miles, 3,900 feet elevation gain
Longest day: 63 miles, from Petralia Soprana to Palazzo Adriano
Most elevation gain: 6,400 feet, from Catania to Mount Etna and back
3 days with noticeable rain on the road
0 accidents, flats or other mechanical problems
0 significant dog encounters

Our Bike Fridays again worked great for us, and seemed perfect for the riding conditions. With their wider tires and nimble handling, they worked especially well on the badly surfaced, irregular or degenerate side roads we often found ourselves on. We had an issue of course with the damage to Rachael's bike during the flight over, but we can't blame the bike for that. (A follow-up: we've taken her bike in for a diagnosis, and it's condition is serious but not fatal - it needs a new front fork and headset).

Internet service was available and free every place we stayed, although at one place it was down for the evening. On the whole, I'd say it was fast enough to be useful but seemed slower than we've gotten accustomed to. In several spots it was very slow, or available only in the lobby.

I found it a bit harder to stay on top of the journal this time, and was a day or two behind for much of the tour. There were several reasons for this (slower wifi; more photos to filter and upload because there was so much to see that seemed worth stopping for; less time in the evening because we travelled slower and stopped often), but it might be me and that aging thing - I seem to be needing more sleep than I once did. It was a bit hard at times, but now that we're done it was clearly worth the effort - there is so much that we saw and experienced that I'm sure we would just forget otherwise.

I carried two cameras with me for the first time - the Panasonic LX7 that I've used on our last several tours, and the Panasonic ZS50 superzoom that I picked up earlier this spring. They worked well together, and are light and compact enough that it was comfortable to carry both of them in the back of my bike jersey so they were always at hand. Taken together they seem to me like an ideal combination for cycle touring. Nearly all of the photos in the journal were taken with the LX7, because it produces a bit higher quality images. It was great having the superzoom too though for the right situation - bird shots, or especially to get close ups of church detail. Nearly everything on the Monreale Cathedral page was shot with the superzoom, for example.

As we always have lately, we planned out the entire itinerary and booked all of the lodging in advance. It works well as an approach for us, but it isn't necessary - at least at this time of year. I would want to reserve in advance at popular places like Siracusa, Ragusa or Taormina, but I think anywhere else we went we would have been fine just stopping in or reserving the day before.

We were really pleased with the both the itinerary and the lodging selections. We felt like we got to see a really good cross section of the island, and there wasn't any place we stayed that we weren't happy to have had on the itinerary (although when we return, we won't try to bike through Catania again).

It sounds like too much to claim that any tour was perfect, but this one was pretty darn close.

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