We were glad we decided to take the caravan last night – gee was it cold! Today, however, is looking a little better. We warmed up pretty quickly as we tried to keep up with “Sunday riders” on their fast road bikes. We climbed up and over each hill dividing small towns with perfect blue skies and a warm sun, it was a wonderful day for riding. Keeping up with fit men on expensive road bikes was taking its toll and it wasn’t long before we had to take off the thermals. There were plenty of riders out today. If you counted up the collective value of the riders bikes – Bianchi, Colnago, DeRosa, Pinarello, etc – it would rival the GDP of some countries.

Considering the hilly terrain we had travelled a good distance in a relatively short period of time so we stopped for a short break to finally fix my gears. The clicking and clunking was annoying and I wanted to fix it up for good! But my skills on the computer keyboard don’t translate as well as I had hoped to bike maintenance. The result of my tinkering ended up breaking the shifters for the rear derailleur. I was now left with the two gears on the front crank – three, if I pull the wire that run underneath the top bar of the frame. It was not quite the desired result I was after.

The hills continued for the rest of the day, including a steep 15% grade hill climb over a mountain that seemed to rise directly out of the Mediterranean. The pass was 300m above sea level and less than a kilometre from the shore. But the effort wasn’t without its rewards. When we came down off the mountain we dropped into a beautiful small fishing village called Rapallo. The temptation to stay was great, but Simon’s long winded synopsis of a B-Grade movie made Sam and I look for any opportunity to leave the area.

The sun was setting, we had nowhere to stay, and we had no food. Lavagna was a very small town with barely any open hotels, let alone open grocery stores. We had to find a campsite before nightfall, after that time it would be almost impossible to find a suitable place to sleep. With our minds racing back to the illegal campsite in the construction site a couple of days earlier, we were determined to find somewhere safe and legal. We a small house just out of the middle of town with a large front yard. We knocked on the door, but got no answer from inside. We stood in the yard and debated if we should stay or leave. It was now almost dark so Sam decided to go back down to the house for one last effort to see if the owner was home, if no-one answered we would move on. But on this occasion we were lucky. The owner was home, and better still spoke was able to speak French with Sam. He agreed to let us stay in the front yard for the night. Within 10 minutes we had setup the tent and started cooking some pasta we found earlier in a small local store.