Days 4 & 5: Lined with Rosemary

We have been slowly, and sometimes steadily, making our way south down Italy's shin and the top of the foot. 

Yesterday's (day 4) breakfast was Thanksgiving after that Sunday eve's brief famine. Breakfast in Italy is usually an espresso and a cornato (croissant), consumed standing at a bar. But this hotel had eggs, cheese, muesli (hello fiber how I miss you), fruit, and about 5 different CAKES. Good fuel for biking! 

Yesterday (day 4) our ride took us through quiet pines, switchbacks for 1,000 feet of climbing, roads lined with rosemary bushes draping down from stone walls. Olive trees. The ocean hundreds of feet below, nearly always present. Miles without cars, rugged empty hills. The weather was gusty, rapid clouds charging across the sky, mountain peaks with cloud hats, cold, but also breaking into sunshine. The sort of day where the pall of winter can still be remembered but it makes everything even more alive for it. 

At times the sky opened, and we waited out the worst of it in a bar with a bunch of white leather booths (read hip coffee spot also nightlife) in a seaside town, drinking coffee and tea. The other folks in there were sharp Italian men, one arranging his gray curls in the wall mirror while on his phone, another in black joggers, a black leather coat, and sunglasses. In our bike shorts, mismatched arm warmers and vests, we looked like a circus act advertising a secondhand store. We get lots of looks bordering on what might be disgust, or maybe just people being unfamiliar with what it's like to make your existence by bicycle. 

And then we get folks like a lady at our hotel, speaking rapidly in Italian, and miming it all out, more or less: "you're so brave to be biking! And it's cold! Be careful and don't get sick in the cold!" I love how much one can pick up from intonation and charades. 

But it's not cold. It's in the 60s during the days and 40s at night. We are blasting around glorying in the sunshine in short sleeves, while the locals are wearing puffer coats and scarves. I hear the south of Italy becomes oppressively hot in the summer, and this must be what people are adapted to.  

Indeed, it is inarguably the off-season right now. We've pedaled thru many vacation-y beach towns, shutters pulled over doors and empty patios. Ghost-town feelings abound. Restaurants are closed when you expect them to be open. The hotel we stayed at last night, this huge grand place, felt almost apocalyptic, as we might have been the only ones staying there. The lobby was fancy with potted plants and floor length mirrors, but when we came back from our walk all the lights were off and we had to feel our way to the stairs to make our way to the 5th floor. Ooof legs. 

There *was* an elevator. But it was no bigger than a coat closet, and painfully slow, in the way where you start thinking about cables and pulleys. Matthew stepped in it and could feel it sigh slightly under his weight. So we took the stairs, and laughed in that kind of groaning bad way, hauling our tired legs all the way to the 5th floor. Workmen had been painting and powering in and out of the other floors, tuning up for the next season maybe, so I suppose they wanted us out of the way.

The room had all of three outlets. And a dark lamp with a cord wound uselessly around it's base. And a silent and empty mini fridge parked on a wall, no outlet within meters. Ha! 

We had tin fish and delicious pesto from a small tub, and a box of green leaves, and bad wine (1.79€ for a liter!) for dinner. 

I was delighted to have a proper sleep, the first one in nights. I'd been lucky to find some valerian herb and chamomile and melatonin (in a chain store named "Conad"). Sleeping is really just gold. 

Today our ride could be titled Behind The Scenes, as Matthew had cleverly stitched together little snaking ways to avoid biking on the highway. Which sometimes involved hefting our bikes over a mound of rubble and dirt, biking on sandy gravel directly next to the beach, threading through a construction zone pathway lined with orange fence, and tracing through closed beach house backyards. 

Our progress was slow but the sense of charting our own course was exhilarating. "I never know if it's going to work when I go around a turn!" said Matthew. But we only hit a true deadend once (between railroad tracks and private homes). We have our route loaded into my little bike computer with GPS (we make it the night before on hotel wifi), which I've never before had on a bike trip, and it has saved so much pained pinching of Google maps on one's phone and wrong turns. 

Tonight we are staying in a wee and ancient hill town, Cetraro, overlooking the ocean. A magical place, again we are all disbelief that it exists and I randomly happened to find it on Booking.com. We did *some* guidebook reading before we left the US, but most of our plans are built as we go. 

Our BnB is on a tiny street, up a tiny staircase, and on a tiny hallway. There are two rooms in the place. It feels like a treehouse overlooking the street. 

Walking around town, we saw a sign that more or less translated to, "something notable happened here in 1190." 1190! To me, these four numbers don't even read as a date it's so old. This place is iterative upon iterative, humans living perched on this hill for countless generations. Matthew and I are absolutely enraptured with how it feels: the old stone walls, the narrow passageways (are these alleys?) too narrow for cars, the staircases winding up and down to other levels. It's all so different from the American strip malls and wide roads and endless parking lots that it feels like we could be in a Disney made-up place. 

But we are the only foreigners here in this off-season moment. It feels so special not to be catered to, to find nothing in English, but it also means there is a lot we can't communicate or understand. Our BnB host had some English and we had our bits of Italian (but we are learning every day!) and with a little support from Google Translate we had lots of laughs and got by just fine. Plenty of "huh!" and "uhmmmm" and stirring our hands around in the International sign for, "I can't think of that word but I'm trying hard!"