We are sure that you all know the rest of the words to our twisted Maggie May journal title - we  just do not want to admit what the sun so obviously reveals! But that don't worry me none, in my eyes, you're everything!! 

The 2023 touring season has been busy for the Cycleblaze followers, in fact it has been hard to keep up with the many interesting journals now available.  The covid days are  a thing of the past - all the flights to Europe are once again full of passengers.  As it is now May, Pat and Scott  have also planned another tour.

On this trip we decided to return to Italy and ride through Tuscany. Tuscany sounds like a fabulous destination but  it was actually a really hard decision. We went to Northern Italy for the first time last September.  We enjoyed all the towns  we travelled through but  often found the road network between them to be a bit wanting for our style of touring. The routing choices at times seemed limited which forced us to ride on busier thorough fares that frequently did not have any shoulder. We found that Italy was definitely not as cycle friendly as some other European countries where we have travelled previously. But we learned to find and map  routings that were the most suitable. For this trip we decided that by planning carefully we could avoid longer spells on  busy roads, although they will be impossible to avoid entirely.  We would also substitute train travel through major population centres where the roads would be the busiest. Many of the route plans were well scoped with Google Street-view with the goal of finding the roads less travelled. So we are off to Tuscany!

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Our tour begins in Milan and we will make our way to Modena where we will ride south crossing the Apennines  (sounds like: AP + UH + NYNZ) into the Tuscany region of Italy. We will continue to ride very short distances heading south, visiting as many towns as we can before turning toward the west coast and then heading north and back toward our starting point of Milan.

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From Wikipedia: Tuscany is, "Surrounded and crossed by major mountain chains and with few (but fertile) plains, the region has a relief that is dominated by hilly country used for agriculture. Hills make up nearly two-thirds (66.5%) of the region's total area, covering 15,292 square kilometres (5,904 sq mi), and mountains (of which the highest are the Apennines), a further 25%".   Sounds like a bit of a challenge.

We are packing and organizing today. Our flight leaves tomorrow and if all goes well, we will be in Milan on Saturday.