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.