CEBToD: Day 13 -- San Remo to Savona

Ha HA! Bet you thought I’d never get back to blogging my Eurotrip, didn’t you? DIDN’T YOU!!! Well, you were wrong. Sadly, my memory’s slightly hazier at this point, but I’m determined to get it all down before I go to Peru in 6 days and I have to wipe my brain’s vacation RAM to make way for new insanity.

So anyways. Today was a very long and rough day. We wanted to get all the way up to Genoa, from which tomorrow we’d likely be training to the Cinque Terra. But Genoa is 140 km from San Remo (something like 90+miles), and though we expected the terrain to be relatively flat, we weren’t entirely sure we could pull it off. And surprise! We didn’t. =D The ride was much tougher than we’d expected, including numerous climbs that weren’t on the map. Overall, we covered about 60 miles and 2200 ft of elevation, in about 4.5 hrs of riding. Today ended up being our longest ride, short of the first day when Dan and I did our 66 mile monster from Barcelona to Girona. And man, was I feeling at at the end of the day.

Highlights of today were many and varied… we rode through a totally random Italian town that apparently specialized in German tourists, though not, apparently, in the German language. One of the restaurants we passed had a sign advertising the special of the day: “SheiBe mit salat.” For those of you playing the home game, that means “shit with salad,” which of course had us in hysterics for a good 15 minutes. That same place had a random-ass gift shop that sold these magazines that came shrink-wrapped with the most bizarrely unrelated objects… for example, one was shrink-wrapped with walkie-talkies, and another with a ball of yarn. Ben couldn’t get enough of them and kept going in and finding even weirder objects shrink-wrapped to magazines… it was quite amusing.

Anyways, after 100 years of riding we finally decided to call it quits in Savona. It’s a big port city, so there was quite a sizeable downtown / old city, and so we pulled in, dismounted, and Ben and I went off separately scouting for hotels while Dan watched the bikes. I actually stopped a woman on the street who I’d overheard speaking French, and asked her if she knew where the Tourist Office was… she said it was closed already. L So I continued on, and came across an apparently Swiss hotel, where the woman at the front desk spoke English, French, Italian, and German. So we did a convo in half French and half English to see if they could take us, and they could, so I checked out the room and came back down and there was that same French woman I’d asked about the Tourist Office! She apparently had been headed to the same hotel… who knew! I think I tried to say “great minds think alike” in French and hosed it up. Ah well. =D

So I went back and got Dan and Ben (Ben hadn’t had luck finding an alternative), so we checked into the Swiss place. We got ourselves cleaned up, then headed out on a quest for dinner. Omg, it took 1000 years to find food. I mean, we kept finding restaurants but they were all full up, which was such a freaking tease, cause after all that biking today we were DYING. We finally found a gelato place and stocked up on ice cream… I got a chocolate with hot peppers that was really good (the Italian who served me made me try it first cause he was worried it might kill me; most Europeans can’t take spicy foods, I’ve learned, unlike us macho Americans!). I asked the gelato guy where we could get dinner, and he pointed us to a place called Vesuvius. We found it, and hilariously it was like a block from our hotel, after we’d walked basically a giant circle around the city for an hour. D’oh!!! Anyways, dinner was great… multiple courses, multiple beers, then we headed back to the hotel and crashed out.

Good times!