Time to leave Tuscany

But before we had another really nice ride throuh the Val d’orcia. Once more we had perfect riding conditions beautiful sunshine, light wind (for once not from the front) and nic eand curvy back roads. Exactly what we needed for this rather long and quite hilly stage.

We made good progress and so in the end we were able to reach our goal for the day with just one mandatory ice crea stop in Acquadepente.

We arrived at Lago Bolsena in the early afternoon, with the clear idea in mind to hang out at the campground have a swim in the lake however we realized that the town of Bolsena seemed really nice. We stopped for food and also at a bikeshop to refill the air in our tires and buy a new pump, I lost the one we had with us the day before.

The experience on the campground was rather mixed. It was the cheapest campground we stayed on our trip and it was located directly at the lake and had old but spotless amenities. However the lovely old lady running the place assigned us a place which was simply a dust pit. It had not rained there for months and this was super fine dust, after errecting our tent Anouk started to play in the dirt I soon realized that this will be all over the place and will stay there forever.

After some heavy discussion on what to do we decided the only wise thing to do, leave everything as it is and go to town and have a drink, look for ice cream and some snacks. Great idea, the town was actually quite beautiful and worth the stop for sure. After the obligatory Aperol spritz and some snacks at a bar everything was fine again. So after our blood sugar level back to normal we went back to the campground and told the lady we want to move somewhere else and got a different spot. Thanks again to the nice Italian bikepacker who was much better equipped than us who borrowed his hammer twice to put the tent nails in the hard ground (normally I was using my biking shoe for this which works astonishingly well, btw.)

Note: The dust that got in touch with the outer shell of our tent is still in there and no light washing or rain was able to get it out so far.

Note2: There is really not much to say about this stage, this was not because it was not nice but rather, because it actually was so nice that we just continued our flow and enjoyed the landscape. Tuscany is definitely a great place for bikeriding!