(Written by Dave)

It rained quite heavily overnight and was raining when the alarm went off at 7AM today.  What else could we do other than to call rain-delay-day number two.  We have few days up our sleeves and a big hill to climb from here to the next stop.  There was some risk of snow as this is a cold storm so decision made, we stayed put.  The forecast for the next 10 days is good – for our entire planned route in Italy, no point in pushing it today when we didn’t need to.

So… today we did little or nothing blog worthy note.  Nancy must have some Catholic genes somewhere as she felt a slight ting of guilt as we made our way outside and there was some blue sky.  Me, I’m pretty happy just hanging and enjoying the day.  We never get to look around these towns when we are riding anyway.

Sestri Levante is a nice little town.  It’s not big but feels pretty big when compared to the micro villages down the coast of Cinque Terre.  It is pretty sleepy and we are outside tourist season and it is clearly a tourist town.  There are clearly lots of beach activities that happen on days warmer than today.

In our wandering about today we managed to find a great chocolate/cake shop – where they made their own chocolate and even sold fancy liquors.  We fortified ourselves with a few chocolate covered nougats that were great and we bought some to fortify ourselves on the road ahead

We also managed to locate the tourist office, even during hours of the day that they were open (not so easy, outside tourist season).  We needed to get better information about our route for tomorrow.   In yesterday’s post, Nancy mentioned the storms, floods and landslides that affected Cinque Terre.  Well, the more we read, the more we got nervous about today’s route.  Many roads and trails were completely wiped out and have not yet had work started on them.  Six people died in the villages and most of the shops in two villages were completely wiped out.  Fixing tourist roads is important for recovery but not a big worry when town inhabitants don’t even have places to live.  News on the internet for the worst affected town seemed to indicate most businesses are still shut it was not clear when they would open for this season.  Quite scary – we were glad we visited and in a small way, contributed to recovery.  And as for our route, we are now “pretty sure” that it is clear.  At least as much as we can find from here.  (don’t worry, there are some alternative routes if we read road closed signs (assuming we can figure out what they say)).

Tomorrow, for sure we ride.  Otherwise, we’ll start having to study Italian.  At a minimum, we’ll have to make bigger purchases at this wonderful coffee shop where we’ve discovered free wi-fi…

This slideshow requires JavaScript.