Short Rest in Venice and on to Trieste and the Beginning of the Ride

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We (Kathy and Kit) arrived in Venice Wednesday evening after delayed and rerouted flight, lugging 50 lb bike cases on and off of two trains, a vaporetto ride up the Grand Canal in the twilight, and a short walk through the cobblestone streets of the Mercato Rialto to our small pension. The whole trip from home to our fourth floor (calculated the American way) walkup room consumed over 24 hours, only one or two of which involved any sleep. The plan was to relax for a day, start to get over jet lag, and enjoy the Venice show without any exertion. And so we skipped the Guggenheim and Leonardo museums, strolled aimlessly in our San Polo neighborhood near the Rialto Bridge, and rode the vaporettos (vaporetti?) to San Marco Plaza and out to the Lido, which we will be biking through from north to south in three days. We had two less than exciting tourist meals, but really enjoyed spending an evening in a wine bar, sampling various rossos from around the country and eating the Italian version of tapas. We did visit several of the stores where reproductions of the old Venetian masks, as well as some new designs, are made hand today for the tourists, and we did buy one nice one.

Relaxed, and on the way to overcoming jet lag, we took a morning train to Trieste got the bikes assembled in reasonable time at our hotel, and the empty suitcases shipped to our biking endpoint at Lecce, which is on the other (west) side of the Adriatic and the other (south) end of Italy. The suitcases will get there on Tuesday; we'll arrive, if all goes as planned, around October 22nd.

Trieste is a quiet port on the northeast shore of the Adriatic Sea. While it's a very old city, it was only and an important one for only about twenty years a little more than two hundred years ago. Empress Maria Teresa liked the place and so had most of the old buildings built that we see today. James Joyce spent several productive years here n the early 20th Century. The population is mixed Slavic and Italian. The restaurant menus are in some Slavic language, English, and German, The beer is good pilsner style lager like we had in Bohemia two years ago. And, the smoked salmon and shrimp linguine was superb. Much, much better than the meh spaghetti we had in Venice, and of the quality we are hoping for and expecting in the rest of Italy.

Tomorrow we had north on the Bike Fridays, along limestone cliffs fronting the Adriatic for about 15 miles before turning west to round the northern end of the sea, hen to head south along the western Adriatic shore. Six days of riding will get us to Ravenna and the end of the first biking portion of the trip.

As always, please scroll below the text where you will usually find more photos.

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Comments

[Julie Bolt]

Hello from Julie
I'm looking forward to reading your blog each day! Sounds like you are off to a good start on your trip.

[Barbara Yasui]

Ravenna
I'm looking forward to following your adventures... Ravenna is where Kim's dragon boat team competed in the International Dragon Boat Championships a couple of years ago. Bob (who spent 6 months in Florence while he was at Stanford) would say, "Eat lots of gelato!"

[KitKats]

Lots of gelato
So far, 1 gelato (each) per day. We'll do our best to keep up hat pace, and we'll do it for Bob!