Rained Out, sort of

Miles from Home - 5509.5 miles

Firsts / Highlights - First cookie in 5 months. First pizza in Italy (prisiutto crudo).

Miles Riden - 5 miles

Vertical Feet - 0 ft

Route - Rode around town for pictures, but no GPS data to show for it.

Tuesday was scheduled to be the long 120km ride. The weather forecast was not looking good, so the guides made a 7:30 call to swap the Tuesday ride with the Wednesday rest day. It turned out that by 9:00, the weather was fine, but the decision had already been made. Fortunately, the rest of the week should be sunny. Tomorrow will be my last day of riding from Hotel Dory before I move on to Venice for the start of the Giro.

The guides for the hotel put in a lot of miles. If you figure 60 miles per day, 6 days per week, and 6 months per year, that is 8,640 miles per year. That's assuming that they don't ride a single mile on their own time. That is twice as many miles as I am likely to ride this summer, even taking 5 months off from work and doing a major tour down the Pacific Coast. When you consider that they are riding in the front of the pack all day, every day, that's a lot of effort.

The guide for my group this week has been Lucia. It is unusual to see Italian women riding bikes at all, much less as a group leader. Our group clearly has not pushed her to her limit.

The head of the guides is Richard (Riccardo) Steiner. He was the coach of the Swiss national team in the Bejing Olympics and brought back 1 gold and 3 bronze metals.