Leaving Finale Soon

Miles from Home - 5362.7
Firsts / Highlights - Stayed warm & dry, unlike much of Italy and Switzerland
Miles Ridden - 39.15 miles
Vertical Feet - 4,209 ft.
Route - View Today’s Route Here
People - Lorenzo – Manager of Hotel Florenz.

This post is from June 26, 2009.



The common tread of all the Bike Hotels is that the owner / manager is actively involved with the guests. The services provided from one hotel to the next are not identical, but so far, I personally know the owner of every one where I have stayed.

Lorenzo is the manger of Hotel Florenz in Finale Ligure. He has helped me build routes in my GPS each day to be sure I find the best roads in the area. The landscape here is a series of parallel valleys all flaring open at the Mediterranean to the south. Ridges rise as much as 3,000 feet at the top of each of these valleys as you head inland toward the Alps. The way you plan a ride around here is to ride along the shore until you get to the valley you want to climb. You then ride into that valley and cross over as many ridges as you care to tackle riding parallel to the sea. Some of the valleys have exposed rock cliffs and some have beautiful beach wood forests. Lorenzo helped me find a good combination.

When it started to look like there might be rain inland, he built a route for me that climbed the ridges closest to the sea. It’s good to have a local expert available.

My reason to spend a few days in Finale was to avoid bad weather that seemed to be everywhere else. As the train pulled out to begin my trip to Switzerland, the umbrella that had protected me was lifted and it started to rain. I am now officially out of safe-havens from the weather. I am going to have to take whatever hits me, and I’m afraid Switzerland knows I’m coming.

This is going to be a fairly condensed trip to Switzerland. First, everything seems to be much more expensive there, starting with lodging. Second, I want to be back down to the Riviera in Monaco for the first stage of Le Tour de France on July 4.

I have another logistical house of cards building. I am leaving my bike & box in Finale while I go to Zermatt and Interlaken. I then return to Finale just long enough to get my bike, but leave the box while I go to Monaco. This will create a very long day of travel, but it allows me to have my bike and hopefully ride the time trial course in Monaco before the race. After I see off the racers on stage 2 of the Tour, I return to Finale and pack my bike into the box before spending one last night at the convent. What happens next depends on the weather forecast. I will either go back to Switzerland on Lake Geneva to see a few days of the Montreux Jazz Festival, or move onto Croatia. If Croatia, that sets off a whole new chain of plans with where to take the bike and box in order to be able to ride ferries and busses where I need to go.

Thank you to Jamie Bischoff at The Travel Center of Steamboat for all of her help getting the lodging logistics worked out for these next few jumps between countries. By design, I left the decisions for the last second, which I know must drive her nuts.



Photographic note – I find that I have been taking a lot of pictures of roads as I am riding. As a photographer, I know there is no reason to take a photo that has no subject or activity, but I am regularly breaking that rule in order to try to capture the mood of these wonderful riding roads. With as lightly traveled as they are, I could wait around for hours before any activity took place that would provide a subject, so I just compose the best I can (with light that is almost always too hot) and shoot. Once I get back home, I think I will create a collection of road pictures and call it “WYLTBRTR” (“Wouldn’t you like to be riding this road?”).

Breaking into a Convent

Before coming to Italy, I was under the impression that cycling was the biggest popular sport in the country. While cycling is much more followed here than in the U.S., football (soccer) is, without a doubt, the biggest sport in Italy.

Late last night I was in my hotel room and kept hearing the sounds of a football match from the field about 2 blocks down the street. I decided that watching some football needed to be part of my Italian experience, so I walked downstairs and headed (no pun intended) over.

There were a series of city league games going on, so I paid my 3 Euros toward their pizza fund and went in to watch. The quality of play was very good. They were not professional, but they were post-collegiate players who obviously had been playing all of their lives. I stayed until the end of the last game, which ended a little past midnight.

The hotel where I am staying is a converted 19th century convent in a very quiet neighborhood, except for the football field. By midnight, the streets are fully deserted.

When I got back to the hotel, I found the 10-foot gate in front of the parking lot closed and locked. A substantial gate with pointed spines from the old days as a convent, in fact, surrounded the entire hotel. The gate was too far away from the building for the night watchman to hear me rattling it, so I needed to find another solution.

A phone number for the hotel was posted on the gate, but I did not have my cell phone with me. There was a side door with an access code keypad and a telephone, but the phone didn't work and they had not given me the access code when I checked in.

Another piece of information that is necessary for this story to make sense is that Finale Ligure is a tourist destination, but it is almost entirely European tourists. In my 3 days here, I have only encountered 2 people who speak English and not a single person (tourist or otherwise) who speak it as a primary language. This made stopping people and asking for help getting access to my hotel fairly complicated. I stopped a couple of people passing by from the recently ended football game, but none of them had a phone or understood what I was asking.

I found a public phone down the street, but it only took phone cards – no coins. Next, I went back to the football field and managed to get one of the players to loan me his cell phone. I had memorized the number posted on the gate, so I called the hotel and reached the night watchman, who spoke no English. I said who I was and my room number and he seemed to understand that I was locked out, but I didn’t have nearly enough Italian in my 12-word vocabulary to say that I was two blocks down the street and would meet him at the gate in 5 minutes. I think he assumed that I was calling from the gate and would go outside to let me in while I held on the phone. When I figured out that while I was holding I was missing my opportunity to meet him, I hung up the phone and gave it back to the football player.

By the time I sprinted back from the field to the hotel, there was no sign of anyone at the gate. I waited for 10 minutes, but no activity. I went between the front gate and the side door a couple of times, but no sign of life either place. I felt like the watchman could have been a little more resourceful if he knew that a guest was locked out and was not at the gate – like try a second time. There was no sign, however, that he was doing any follow-up after his first attempt failed.

I eventually decided that my only two options were to somehow climb the gate or sleep on the sidewalk outside the hotel. I assessed whether or not I could safely get over the gate, and decided it was worth a try.

I successfully climbed up and over, assuming that would be the end of this mis-adventure. When I got to the hotel door, it was also locked and the night watchman was not at the front desk. I figured that he was not a desk attendant, just a watchman who slept in the basement and answered the phone if it rang. I pounded on the door for a while, but no one answered. Checking every door yielded no joy.

Just as I was becoming reconciled to sleeping on a deck chair next to the pool, the watchman appeared. He didn’t seem very happy, in fact, I think he literally growled at me. As far as I could tell, he never even questioned how it was that I got inside the gate. I gave him a grunt of acknowledgement and went to my room.

I’m not sure if this place was built to keep people in or out, but convents are tough places to break into.

Seaside

Miles from Home - 5362.7
Firsts / Highlights - Began to explore Ligure
Miles Ridden - 50.75 miles
Vertical Feet - 4,060 ft.
Route - My GPS lost my route today. I have a message into Garmin tech support to try to get it resolved.
People - Just me.


Visualizza Finale Ligure in una mappa di dimensioni maggiori

This post is from June 24-25, 2009.



This was my first day at a Bike Hotel in Finale in the region of Ligure. It is the heart of the Riviera, and I selected it really for one reason. It wasn’t raining here. Much of Italy and everywhere I checked in Switzerland were looking like rain or snow most of this week. I may have painted myself into a logistical corner by coming so far south, but the objective of staying warm and dry were met. The sun was out and the beaches were busy all day.

I didn’t subject the sunbathers to my biker’s tan (tan up to about 3 inches above the knee and 6 inches below the shoulder – everything else is pasty white). For me, tan is a relative term, but there is a noticeably different shade of white. Whether you call it a biker’s tan or a farmer’s tan, it’s not going to see the beach.

This bike hotel is a bit of a step down from the great experiences I have had so far. Not terrible, but not quite so exceptional. Walking from the train station ¾ of a mile with my backpack, bike and bike box on sidewalks that were not wide enough for 2 people to pass was a bad start. The pay-for-a-guide and pay-for-laundry models were also a step down from the other hotels. Finally, the quality of food included with the half-board package was not as good as my previous stays and the dining room was overrun with screaming kids (the sound of screaming kids does not seem to be language-dependent). I dropped half-board for the remainder of my stay, so the food and screaming kid problems are solved. I think overall everything will be just fine.

Somewhat like Riccione, the mountains climb immediately out of the sea here. A thin strip of flat oceanfront, then the climbing begins. After the Alps, the grades here were a welcome relief. I climbed 4,000 feet today, but the grade rarely went outside the 4-7% range. That allowed me to do some “tempo” climbing where I could maintain a higher cadence than has been possible for the past week. It felt good and my legs have a different type of fatigue tonight.



At the top of the 3,000’ pass, the road passed through some kind of military fortress. This seemed more modern than the medieval walled cities I have seen everywhere. It had a stone trench around it like a mote, it was built into the mountaintop and it had chimneys coming out of the top. The tunnel passing through it was 50 meters long with an atrium in the middle and the building was at least 300-400 meters wide. I need to learn more about it, but it created some interesting photographic opportunities.



Another uncategorized observation is street markets. I frequently come upon markets during my rides. Almost every one of any size has at least one vendor selling all purple clothes. Sometimes there are 3 or 4 stalls in a row with nothing but purple. The odd thing is that I don’t see a disproportionally high percentage of people wearing purple. Another one of those mysteries. I’m sure Daniele’s response would be a shrug, and he would say, “It’s Italian”.