My initial plan was to stay longer on the campground and then take the train passing Napoli straight to the site of Pompeii. But again as already after crossing the alps we thought that taking the train was just not right and that we should continue our way in the saddle. Also by that time we decided that we were ready to bike in the streets of a major Italian city.
With the help of Alltrails I found a way on side roads into the city and also a bike path through the city that would take us some kms from the stadium to the city centre.
From a cycling view the way to get there wasn’t nothing spectacular, only flat with one hill to overcome before entering the city. The road itself was actually an experience, the environment reminded us a bit of places we had seen on our trips to Asia, everything dusty and a bit broken, also with people on the streets where we wondered what they were actually doing there and also we had to take 2 detours because of collapsed bridges… However this had no impact on our planning since this was already known to Alltrails and the GPS track guided us around it… Another funny encounter was the guy who almost through himself out of his car window when he passed us giving us thumb ups. He even stopped and cheered us on. During our ride we got a lot cheers, astonished stares, accomlplishing nods and thumb ups from people we passed on the road. But he was by far the most remarkable one.
Entering the Napoli however was also slightly weird, the uphill was on some narrow side roads which were super steep, which required some dismounting and pushing my bike with the trailer and also crossing some railroad tracks…. We crossed the city border on a totally unspectacular road where you would never think that you are entering a city with a population of 1 million people.
From there the ride turned into a total adventure. Soon the roads got wider and wider with more lanes and also with some huge potholes since we were going down again we were fairly fast… (I am definitely going to add a camera to my bike for the next trip) We managed to make our way through the traffic until we actually found the very useful cycle path into the city centre. The path was really good…. until it went through a tunnel and at the exit it was barred and ended in oncoming traffic…. But experienced as we were by then we also found a way around it and made our way to the harbour along the piers cafes and nice boats all the way to our appartment for the night.
The apartment wass very close to the old town of Napoli. Which was once again perfect for us. Since it was not on our initial plan we had only limited info on the city beforehand and we were both really positive impressed by it when we roamed around the old town throughout the afternoon. Also Anouk seems have a lot of fun with all the people around and shopping windows to look at.
