Riding Day 1- An Education in Touring

(UPDATED)
Hello all.  I am writing this blog from a small town in Italy called Capranica, and when I say town I more so mean old fort or castle.  We are strategically located in a valley about 150 ft above the floor of the valley (a lot of stairs to get up here... With loaded touring bikes climbing stair is a rather hard chores).  The apartment is really nice, but like every thing around here it is many many hundreds of years old (with some modern updates), but as such the wifi is not very good so I can not upload any pictures to the blog for this post.  If I have better wifi tonight, I will try to update this post with the pictures we have.

Photo in front of Vatican, marking the beginning.

Goodbye photo with the owners of Collalti Bici. Thanks again for everything!

Yesterday (ya I am writing this post again the morning after... This may become a trend) was a long day.  What was supposed to be around 48 miles of riding turned into about 60 miles, so a rather long first day.  We accidentally took the wrong side of a fork in the road, that took us off our path and up into the hills around Rome, so we had a lot of hill climbing, and we got well off and away from, the correct path before we realized what we did.  On top of that, for most about 15 to 20  miles Ben was riding with a pannier constantly rubbing against his rear tire, unbeknownst to us.  Early that day his bike hit the ground (he didn't really fall, more so just dropped the bike) and the rear rack lost a screw, this in turn led to it being pulled askew from the other side and the pannier grinding on the tire.  This made pedaling rather hard for Ben and really slowed our pace.  We figure out the issue with the bike when we stopped along a lake to take a break.  When we did we decided to try and find a bike shop, this led to another realization. On Sunday in Italy, everything is closed... Really almost everything.  This little fact also led to us not having eaten hardly anything in the morning as the cafe we wanted to go to was closed, and when we wanted lunch everything was closed, so we got snacks from a supermarket.  Overall, really our energy intake was not near large enough for the energy we exhausted to get to Capranica.  After searching for a shop or anything helpful for the broken rack for a while and brainstorming ideas on how to fix it we eventually found a way to jerry rig the rack with some hardware from the flashlight mount, so that it would work.  With all these issues we lost a lot of time and what we though would take around 4.5 hours to ride ended up taking about 8-9 hours.  It was a long day, but did make it all safe and sound.  When we got here we, at about 9:00 pm or 9:30 pm, we raided what little food was in the pantry and ate a random assortment of pasta with olive oil... We overcooked some pasta, undercooked other pieces, and way over salted the water but due to our exhaustion it tasted amazing. For a first day it was very eventful, and hopefully today we don't have any issues, luckily we made today a short day as well.

Our first day of touring yesterday, really taught us a lot, and we are excited to get to rolling out of Capranica and on to the next town, and hopefully today is not nearly as eventful as yesterday.  Again I hope to maybe throw in some pictures once I get good wifi, but for now this is all I have for you.  So, all the best and until next time.

Picture by the lake where we discovered the issue with Ben's bike

Break before the final push to the end.