Another wonderful trip comes to an end, as they all must, but sweet memories linger. Although the original scope of our journey turned out to exceed our time frame, especially when bad weather and a medical issue intervened, it didn’t exceed our ambitions – we had to scale back our goals, but the quality of the journey was not diluted, in fact quite the opposite. We made the best of the hand we were dealt, re-evaluated our goals and all turned out wonderfully well. We cycled through the imposing Dolomite mountains, rode beside the Adriatic sea, through vineyards, olive plantations, fruit orchards, farm fields, beautiful medieval hamlets, modern, bustling towns, through tunnels, over bridges, under passes in wind, rain and glorious, warm sunshine. We ate well, had nice accommodations, great cycling and learned a lot about the cultures and lifestyles of the countries we wheeled through and a lot about ourselves too. There were tiring days, easy days, long days, short days but all were inspiring for one reason or another.
The scenery in some areas was unbelievable, the great people we met along the way were extremely warm and accommodating, the historical and cultural aspects of the places we were visiting were enlightening to say the least and the incredible architecture or feats of engineering we saw had us shaking our heads in disbelief. Wow. How could these marvelous structures have been built centuries ago without the benefit of computers or modern-day construction machinery, we asked ourselves….. and yet, they did. Astounding.
Of course, there was more to this trip than just cycling. Each day we took time out to enjoy a cappuccino, glass of beer or wine al fresco and let the culture of the area soak in – it was great. For me personally, a big highlight of this trip was reconnecting with relatives living in Italy whom I seldom see. They extended every possibly courtesy to me and treated me like a king and warmly embraced my travelling companions as well.
As one can expect, not everything was peaches and cream, especially for me when an eye issue developed which needed immediate attention. This caused an unexpected change of plans, but the amigos took it all in stride and accepted the situation without complaint for which I will always be grateful.
It occurred to me on more than one occasion while sipping a cappucino on a sunny cafe patio how fortunate we 3 blokes were to be able to persue our ambitions thanks to our good health and situation in life. What a gift we’ve been given to be in this position.
In bringing this epilogue to a conclusion, I have to say thank you to my family who helped and supported us, drove us to the airport and picked us up despite our late arrival, encouraged us and welcomed us home. A big thank you also to those who followed us on our blog site and left positive comments, friends who saw us off and my 2 amigos Gene and Bill for the expert navigation, route-finding and trip planning. I only hope you both had as much fun as I did.
And that’s about it, folks. Thanks for coming along on this memorable journey.
There is one question I keep asking myself: What adventure awaits? ….. beyond the gate ………. on the road less traveled …..
Fabio
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This will be my fourth trip with the amigos and the one that took the most planning to prepare for. The biggest factors to me were the shipping of bikes and selection of gear to take, even though we had done this on our trip to the Sunshine Coast & Vancouver Island 1 year ago. This trip was initially going to involve more climbing, so a lighter load was called for, which turned out in our favour on some of the walls we had to scale at times.
Once there, in Italy, I was quite concerned with the roads we were to travel on… would they be dangerous or so busy with traffic that we would have to keep finding new routes to our daily destination points. The new tablet I purchased for the trip turned out to be a lifesaver, as the GPS section on Google maps showed us exactly where we were every time we stopped. Also, downloading the offline maps in Google really helped, as we didn’t need to rely on a wifi source. I was really surprised how quickly we got to Pordenone the first day of riding. This basically set the rout planning for the rest of the trip.
Some of the roads we took were quite busy, but… only one or two vehicles skimmed us closely the whole trip. 99.9% of the vehicles gave us a wide berth, not like the drivers do here in TBay. There are so many bicycles on the roads over there, it’s a written rule, they and pedestrians have the right of way, and don’t even think of doing something drastic to them. We were thinking there must be a hefty fine if you hit a cyclist or pedestrian. A few times we took some wrong turns and ended up heading onto the autoroutes (A#), but we usually got honked at, warning us we weren’t allowed there.
Another thing that was quite evident was the difference in the people’s looks in the different countries. In Italy we got waves and warm smiles, and the people were talkative when they saw our Canadian flags. In Slovenia and Austria, facial expressions changed. We smiled but only got stern looking straight faces in return. I’m not saying everyone was like this though. I found it a little unnerving at times… wondering what these people were thinking. When talking to one of the people that stopped to ask if we needed help, we were told that the Austrian people and very ridged because of the German origin, but they get things done, unlike the Italians who are more relaxed and laid back.
My highlight of the trip was cycling in the Dolomites… an item that needed to be checked off my bucket list. I’ve been dreaming of doing this ever since I started cycle touring back in 2000… back in the early 80’s I was mostly racing. I really enjoyed going through B.C. on our 2012 west Canada tour and planned on riding through the Alps some day. We didn’t complete our intended route due to weather and medical issues, so we had to modify it due to the time we had remaining. Still it was an all round amazing trip. What we did see will be embedded in our minds forever.
Gene
The Amigos Cycle Europe 