Lovely Lucca

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Bluck!

That word (just made up) pretty much summarises today's ride. Our planned route (which looked so good on the map) was to follow the quiet roads down the river Arno, cutting off about 20kms east of Pisa and head towards Lucca where we would spend a night at a hostel.

I don't think in the end we chose a bad route, as there were loads of local cyclists out racing and training absolutely everywhere, so they must think it is a good enough route to ride, but the whole day was just spent in heavy traffic with very little to see really. Oh, and of course Florence wouldn't let us go, it took us at least an hour to get out of town as I took us down one wrong turn after another, and then when we'd actually get to the road we planned to take, we would find it was a one way street going the wrong way, or that it suddenly became a two lane highway. We just couldn't fetch a break and the nerve's were fraying.

There were some beautiful spots along the route, and it was certainly fairly easy riding, but 20kms from Lucca, the heaven's opened again, and we suddenly found ourselves low on energy, wet, tired and on what seemed to be the main truck route into town. At one particularly unnerving spot, we has just stopped on the side of a road when a big truck slammed on it's brakes and proceeded to skid 5 metres to exactly where we would have been standing if we hadn't just pulled over.

After restocking our energy at a supermarket just out of town and with the rain stopped, we were very thankful to find the way to the hostel extremely well signed and easy to get to after the last fiascos of the last two days. It was a beautiful big old hostel as well, just within the castle walls. We booked in for two nights and put the bikes away for a day.

Lucca was our type of town, small enough that Christie could do two circuits around the town wall for her morning run and still be back within 45 minutes (The town is famous for it's walls), and it also had wonderful cafes (oh, if I could only tell you about the Lasagna) and lots of bike shops. Christie got another warm cycling jacket which was on special and also sweet talked one of the mechanics into fixing her gears (she hadn't been able to use her top gear fo rthe last two days) for just 3Euro more.

I got the laundry done ...

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Today's Ride: 89.9km, Total Distance: 287.9km, Today's ride time: 4,49"

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