-> Randy's 2009 Sabbatical Photos <-
It has taken a long time for me to make this final post for my grand adventure. The reason for the delay has mostly been the amount of time it has taken to select and process all of my photos, but in the back of my mind, I also knew that this post would mean that the trip is really over. Now that it has been over for about as long as I was gone, the denial phase must finally end.
For those of you who don't know, I ended up returning to work about 3 weeks ahead of schedule due to a major unexpected project that came up while I was away. Unfortunatley, that meant that my tour along the Pacific Coast did not happen on this sabbatical, but I can hardly complain. Having an opportunity like this with a job waiting when I returned was a unique and fortunate circumstance. The fact that it ended a little sooner than expected does not deminish it a bit. Like I said when I was leaving Europe, it is alway important to finish up wanting more, and I certainly do. I'm ready to do it again without hesitation.
Weighing in at 839 pictures, it is hard to believe that I have done extensive editing. Believe it or not, these are just the ones that made the cut from who knows how many that I took. Many of these will be familiar from my blog posts along the way, but a good number will be new as well.
Photo Organization
With so many pictures, I felt like I needed to organize them in a way that would allow them to be viewed in bite-size chunks. I chose to categorize them by location into 20 galleries. The galleries range in size from 3 and 94 images. The first couple of frames in each gallery provide a national and regional map to give a sense of where you are. The gallery description just above the photos contains the dates I was there along with a link to the blog stories about that location (e.g., "Stories posted on my blog related to this gallery: Articles about Riccione"). For deeper detail, particularly if you are ever interested in following any of my rides on your next trip to Italy, you can view maps and elevation profiles of every ride from the blog entries from the links labeled "View Today's Route Here".
If you are not familiar with the SmugMug gallery design, please be sure to play with the "Style" button to find the method for viewing the pictures that you like best.
What's Next
The Travel Center at Steamboat (the travel agency at my company) helped me throughout my trip making reservations on-the-fly as I planned my trip from the road. When I returned, I raved about the Italy Bike Hotel experience until Jeff Daniels finally said, "Okay, let's build a package trip around that for next Spring and see if we can find some interest". Well - that has happened, and The Travel Center is now offering a package that mirrors some of my experiences this April 30 - May 10! It will start in Milan, go to Riccione for a few days of riding, then to Siena for some rides around Tuscany and back to Riccione and Milan. A great Spring warm-up without the extremes of the climbs in the Alps. If we can generate the needed bookings, I will be going back to Italy as the on-the-ground facilitator to introduce a group of Americans to the unique form of travel that worked so well for me. How great would that be? Please let me know if you think you might want to be one of those Americans. I'll be happy to get you in touch with the right people.
Thank you
It was fun hearing from many of you who were following me throughout this trip. Let's do it again sometime (soon).
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