Mezzocorona – Claiano 56.88km 🚴♀️ 4.16.06 ⏱13.3km/hr ⬆️ 1035m 1228m on Strava) ⬇️ 315m 🌡30C
After a good sleep 💤 the alarm 🚨was not a pleasant awakening this morning. Even though we could sleep in a little, breakfast was not before 7.30, it still felt too early to get out of bed. But we did anyway since we had a big day ahead. Breakfast was pretty good! We could choose between all kinds of cake 🍰, bread 🍞, eggs 🍳, cheese 🧀, ham, apples 🍎 and yoghurt. Once we finished breakfast it was time to step on the bike, but not before we asked the people at the agriturismo for some help with the first part of the route. Google Maps and Pocket Earth 🌎 disagreed whether we could take a back road we had found, but after a long and highly confusing discussion between the two Italian ladies we just went for it. The biggest part was on a bike path and when we hit a roadblock 🚧 we went around and continued anyway.
The back road finally led back onto the busier main road. After navigating a few turns followed by a short downhill we were headed up this serious climb to Denno. The view was amazing. We left the vineyards behind us for now and cycled through apple 🍎🍏 country. Fields and fields filled with apple trees. An older men on a race bike passed us. An electric Pinarello. Mas always looks at the brand and the stuff that’s on it. So many cyclists on electric bikes. Not the ones we see in Holland, but mostly mountain or race bikes.
Anyway, Denno. When we thought we made it all the way up well we didn’t. We still had to go up quite a bit in this village itself. Pretty boring. From Denno we cycled to Cunevo, our coffee ☕️stop for this morning. No cute little bar this time, but outside the local gas station⛽️. The coffee was alright, the view wasn’t, but Mas was only checking out La Gazette dello Sport depicting De Ligt in a Juventus jersey. They just undressed his AJAX-jersey and dressed him with a black and white one, not cool people, not cool. After this heartbreaking 😢 moment we went grocery shopping. First we had to cycle up this hill, really??, only to find this small store. We bought some bread 🍞, cheese 🧀and ham and this cost us half an hour as there were two ladies before us who were so incredibly slow and chatty and the store employees were not in a rush either. Not that we are in a rush, but it doesn’t feel good to waste time when you know you still have a full day of cycling ahead.
Back on the bike we enjoyed another short downhill just after Terres before we saw the road going up on ‘Apple Hill’. Some really sharp hair pin turns, but the view was amazing and it was a pretty smooth climb. Again we had to cycle some more once we got to this town called Tuenno, but going up 🆙 was today’s theme anyway. We cycled for a short bit along a lake on a busier road to Cles, our turning point. From there we made a left turn onto an awesome 😎 bike path which we would stay on for the rest of the day.
At the start of the bike path we sat down at a picnic table and ate our sandwich 🥪 while watching a big and obviously inexperienced cycling familia block the entire road. After lunch we continued our way on the bike path. It went up and down the whole time. Nasty short inclines and declines so it was impossible to get in a flow. It was rough and hard work and in the woods for the first part so there wasn’t a lot of distraction. We also had to be careful for other cyclists since they can get pretty wild.
Enough complaining. It got much better after the first few kilometres. Awesome view of the river next to us and the mountains 🏔 all around us. We would cycle only about 60km today, but it took forever because we mostly went up. We will get back some downhill meters over the next two days although it’s still a lot of climbing as well.
After Mas cycled into a huge hole on a downhill, which easily could have been a broken wheel or at least some busted spokes, we had to cross the busy road and cycle up five hundred meters with a 13% incline to the campground ⛺️Suuz had spotted. It’s a small campground at a farm, but apparently tonight there are two bigger groups there creating the necessary noise and bbq smoke. We did laundry 🧺 and chilled out on a blanket in front of our tent eating almost everything we could find in our food bag. There was no store nearby and the nice restaurant close by only opened at 7.30pm and it was like 3.30. Suuz got more and more hangry with the minute so luckily she fall asleep for a bit.
At 7:30pm sharp we stood in front of the door of the restaurant ready for a feast. We wolfed down the amuse and the bread they gave us to start with. After we had a nettle risotto with drops of stinky cheese 🧀 and sepia ravioli with a shrimp 🦐 bisque. As mains we ordered Alpine salmon trout 🐠 and rabbit 🐇 wrapped in local speck. The Trentino-Alto wine 🍷tasted great as well. We hadn’t planned on ordering dessert, but when the waiter mentioned chocolate 🍫soufflé we were sold. Who can turn down that gooey taste of heaven!?
After dinner we went back to the tent 🏕, read a little 📚 and prepared for another big day tomorrow. We will have to climb the Tonale pass in the first 18km and cover more than a 1000m incline, but after we reach the top it will be mostly downhill to Edolo. But first hopefully a good sleep 😴 at 1000m above sea level.
