Accomodations in Tuscany

One thing more scary than the hills in Tuscany are the accomodation prices. The Tuscan country-side isn't a major destination for budget conscious travellers, so there are almost no hostels and few campgrounds. We found only one campground along our route, at the end of our first day. And this was no ordinary campground - it featured seven different swimming pools, three bars, and four or five restaurants (for thirty euro a night). It was very reminiscent of the all-inclusive resort my family travelled to in Mexico last Christmas. Of course, this campground wasn't all-inclusive, but the illusion was nevertheless quite realisitic because cash was not accepted on the campground. All campers had to load cash onto a magnetic card which could be used at the bars and restaurants. So, with a mere flick of the card, a cup of gelato or a plate of appetizers would be served up. Human nature being what it is, everybody's card ends up getting flicked a lot and the campground-resort makes two or three times what it would have made otherwise.























One other accommodation in Tuscany deserves mention. After the awful hill near the town of Cavriglia (described in a previous post) we were feeling quite demoralized and exhausted. We decided to stop in Cavriglia to rest for a few hours and check at the tourism office for more detailed maps and campground information to be able to make a better plan for the next few days. The tourism office was closed until 4 in the afternoon, and we decided to wait rather than risk heading out again into unknown territory. With only one cafe in town, our choices for how to kill time were limited. We spent most of the time in a playground, resting on picnic benches in the 40 degree heat while the local kids eyed us and our bikes warily. This wouldn't be a very interesting story if the tourism office had opened and we had gone on our way (and I hope that we have been only posting interesting stories here), so you can probably guess that 4 o'clock came and went with no tourism officer in sight. The town we were in had no hotels (it was not very touristy - more working-class) and our map didn't show any nearby campgrounds. Our only lead was a street sign that pointed to a campsite (but without any distance) down a road that our map showed to be very windy and steep. And, needless to say, we were wary of Tuscan roads that were windy and steep. Nonetheless, we didn't have any other decent options, so we set off (rather, we set up) the hill. About 1 km along, we came across an accommodation sign at the side of the pointing down a gravel road. There was a handwritten sign in Italian underneath (which we couldn't read) but we decided to try our luck and investigate. A little ways down the road we came to a beautiful stone house guarded by a beautiful and friendly golden labrador. We soon met the owners and explained our predicament in a mix of French, broken Italian, and hand signs. They, in turn, communicated to us that although they rented out rooms in their home during the summer, they were on vacation and weren't taking guests.



Fortunately, our sweaty bodies and anxious faces inspired their sympathy and they offered us a room for a very reasonable price of seventy euros. At this point, with the sun beginning to set and our legs ravaged from all of the days climbing, we would have happily slept in a broom closet, but we were given our pick of all of the rooms in the house.


We picked a beautiful room on the main floor with an arched roof and French doors that opened directly onto the patio (these features weren't as important to us as the fact that, being on the main floor, we didn't have to climb stairs). The villa featured a gorgeous swimming pool that overlooked a valley below, were we could sit and watch the sunset over the surrounding olive trees and wineries. Our hosts were incredibly friendly, feeding us olive oil freshly squeezed from their own olives as well as many homemade honeys whose distinctive flavours arose from the different pollens used by the bees.

All in all, this was one of the highlights of the trip and definitely turned a rough day into a unique and wonderful experience.

Cycling in Tuscany

The next morning we were up early to begin the next stage of our
cycling, in Tuscany. Getting out of the big city was easier than usual,
and within an hour we were riding through the Tuscan country-side. The
scenery was striking, with rolling hills covered by wineries and olive
trees stretching into the distance.







One thing that we also noticed were the hills. Although Tuscany is certainly not mountainous, the climbs are very, very steep. Our first day, we faced incredible hills both up and down. The latter were almost as hard at the former because with all of the weight we are carrying, it is hard work braking on steep hills and overheated rims is a real danger.



One hill in particular is worthy of special mention. On our third day of cycling in Tuscany, we decided to take a short-cut along a small road which was a few kilometers shorter than the main route. All went well for the first ten or fifteen kilometers as we pedalled along a winding river, the air scented with honeysuckle. Then I noticed something unusual on the map on my GPS - a sharp kink in the road that had not been visble at the lower resolution of our paper map. (You can see it here.) I thought to myself that it must be a few switchbacks on a little hill, and didn´t think too much of it. A few kilometers later, we had arrived at the hill stretching up ahead of us like a waterfall of asphalt. Within seconds, we were using all of our energy simply to make our pedals turn, and within minutes, even that was impossible. We were walking our bikes before even the first switchback was completed. As we plodded up under the blazing Tuscan sun, buses and trucks rushed past, swinging wildly around the switchbacks. As we rounded the curve of the first switchback, I said to Jodie that at least the hill would be short-lived, as there were only two switchbacks visible on the map. We struggled up around the second curve, anticipating the sweet relief of flatness, only to see that far from heralding the peak of the hill, the end of the switchbacks simply meant the road now began to travel straight up the incline, rather than moving back and forth across it. Perhaps the Italian government had become short on asphalt, or maybe the construction crews in charge had finished in a hurry to catch a World Cup game... Who knows? The incline, already punishing, increased dramatically, but we had no choice but to push on. The smell of honeysuckle, so pleasing before, became like poison in our noses. The olives surrounding us looked so vile they burned our eyes. Still we climbed. Our stores of water dwindled, then ran out completely. Still we climbed. Hours stretched into days, and days into weeks, yet still we climbed. Entire empires rose and fell while we climbed. Eventually we did make it to the top, but like children having just seen a horror movie, we could not shake the feeling that the hill was lurking behind every curve in the road, waiting for our attention to wander so that it could leap up and send us tumbling back to the very bottom.

Florence

With the end of the train strike, we made our way to the Levanto train station where we caught a train to Florence via Pisa. Florence (large, busy, hordes of tourists) was a bit of a shock after Levanto (small, quiet, local) but we did our best to adjust quickly. The main campground in the city is on a hill high above the city center, so we immediately got an appetizer of the Tuscan hills. We only had one afternoon before we were to start cycling, so we planned to see as many of the big tourist attractions as we could. However, line-ups are a ubiquitous part of the Florence experience - even in low-season, the wait to enter the Galleria dell'Accademia was over 5 hours. We had been warned about this before we left, but with an unpredictable schedule (due to weather, train strikes, uncertain distances) we couldn't make reservations (even with reservations, we heard the wait was three hours). Instead of waiting in line, we spent the afternoon walking through the city and seeing some of the smaller sights.

Our campground was only a few hundred meteres from the Plaza Michelangelo, one of the best places to see the city.



We took some good pictures from here, before descending to explore the city.



One really neat thing was that our campsite was in a historic olive grove, so we were surrounded by olive trees as you can see in the bottom picture below.