Day 68. 20km (78201kms 7yrs)

I’m very fortunate that ordinarily I wake gently to the first daylight, but this morning an alarm jerked me out of sleep in order to catch my bus. Having revised and re-revised my itinerary through Italy as the wheel build dragged on, I now had no choice but to take a bus all the way to Sicily in order to meet my mum in Palermo at the end of the week. I consoled myself I’d ridden this stretch before in 2018 but it was still disappointing.

€3 for me and €7.50 for Gibbo as ‘special oversize luggage’ was an absolute steal though! I packed all panniers into a plastic sack to comply with the one hold baggage allowance that the €3 ticket included. It’s just like taking a flight except I didn’t so much as have to remove a wheel! And so for just over €10 I zoomed across southern Italy in comfort, charging my devices and using the surprisingly fast wifi. Initially I was slightly alarmed to see we were heading the the wrong direction (could there be another Villa San Giovani and I’ve bought the wrong ticket again!!) but no, we first looped north east to Bari, south to Taranto, before continuing south west to the Sicily ferry.

Here we were dropped very handily for foot passengers, but as a vehicle I was sent all the way out of the ferry terminal in order to buy my ticket. A 20 minute crossing later I was in Messina Sicily, totalling 9 hours travel from Matera. It’s an attractive notion to cover such distance so quickly and cheaply but I don’t want to make a habit of it. One of the beauties of bike travel is seeing all the in between stuff that bus travel misses.

Sicilians were out for the their passeggiata, crowding the pavement and bike lane, but there were sufficient cyclists that pedestrians were ready to move aside for bikes. The dense population and lack of any undeveloped land was a concern. I thought by riding all the way out to the island’s north east corner I might find some space, and indeed there was a little less activity on the north coast but still scant empty land. A concrete stretch of derelict who-knows-what offered a reasonable hiding place beside the beach. No one was on this narrow stretch of sand and the buildings were locked from the roadside. The sun was setting so this graffitied shelter would be my home for the night.

If you enjoy my vlogs, blogs, and photogs please consider joining me on Patreon 😃
https://www.patreon.com/helsonwheels?...

#italy #sicily #travel