Stage 19 Giro d'Italia

Today was an awesome day! We got up early to have coffee and a pastry then rolled out in search of the Giro (Tour of Italy cycling race) just after 8am, and the roads were amazingly quiet, they must be late starters here. Cycling from Milan to Desio, the town the Giro passes through, was pretty painless. For the first part we hopped on and off the footpath until we got out of town. It was a cruisy roll of about 20km.

Seeing the Giro caravan and the efficiency of the whole set up was pretty amazing. In the 2 hours we were there, a busy city street was transformed into a cycling race frenzy. Hundreds of Italianos who hadn’t even heard of the Giro went a bit crazy, along with us.

Literally five minutes after the peloton had passed everything had gone including barricades, flags, signs etc.

We jumped back on our bikes for the roll back to Milan at a very easy pace, the 20km took us about an hour and included footpath and tram track hopping, dodging many, many cars and pedestrians. There’s definitely a greater level of respect given to cyclists here – we were given heaps of room and no aggro!

We are going to check out the time trial on Sunday, the finish is only 1.8km from where we’re staying and the whole route is about 20km.

Right now, we’re going to search for a Laundromat (Scotty is a bit stinky) and grab some lunch prior to our siesta…yeah! The photos have been updated too.

Please leave blog comments, we love reading them and so do all our buddies! The emails are awesome too!

Milano here we come!

We drove about 300km through scenic mountain ranges, from Marina di Pisa to Milan. The 130km/h speed guideline was a bit of a challenge to stick to when doing 130 means you are holding up Ferraris, Porshes, Daewoos etc who wanted to go much faster!

We stopped near Parma (as in Parmesan/Parmigiana) for our first taste of Italian pizza…mmm

We have just arrived at our Milan home for 4 days and it is cool!!! Right in the middle of everything. Hopefully it won’t take too much to find the Giro d’Italia and see some action. And some shops!

Pisa one minute, Milano the next

Thanks to everyone for the nice emails and comments! We are having lots of fun!

Sergio and I jumped into our brand new Peugeot in Rome, only 2 days ago, and hit the Roman streets on the wrong side (right side) of the road! We’ve been staying at the Pisan coast for 2 days and are about to drive to Milan to see some of the Giro d’italia. Here are some of the highlights so far:

• The old badly built building in Pisa
• Learning how to count to 10 in Italian while eating yummy gelati
• Discovering that the restaurant we thought was a pizzeria was a seafood restaurant (great if you like seafood!)…mussels, baby octopus, fresh sardine…blah. Antipasto will never be thought of the same again!
• Riding from Marina di Pisa to the leaning tower – motorists here rock! The roads are seriously crappy but still they go out of their way to NOT give us grief like Aussies do.
  
• Italian coffee is really good! (like Sergio’s)
• Floriana found out she still has a job…yay. It is still a bit crap though cos lots of my good work buddies won’t be there when I come back : (
• Figuring out what everything in the supermercato is…we have managed to cook pancakes and scrambled eggs for breakies!

Love Floriana and Sergio

Our holiday has started!

Right now we're sitting in Hong Kong airport...1am Australia time...waiting for our flight to Rome! We are very tired and had a whole tour group of Chinese people sitting all around us on the flight here...aaaahhhh!!! Hopefully this flight will be a bit quieter.

The airline food rocks! For dinner we had Italian beef with potatoes, apple and cinnamon creamed rice, a delish salad...and as much wine as we can drink. Scotty saved some and it just got confiscated in security. D'oh!

We've managed to knock off 2 Qantas blankets (good for covering up stuff in the back of the car) and we just spent about an hour sampling all the duty free stuff incl $100 lip balm, renewing eye cream and fancy perfume. So refreshing...not.

So far we have taken 2 photos...check em out : )

le Holiday Route

This is where we will be heading for the Euro part of our trip! The dates may be a bit out but we're hoping to follow this general route...please email us if there is something we should absolutely not miss in any of the places we go through!!

The first stage in our trip preparations - totally redo the 70's bathroom so that our house-sitter Kris can enjoy luxurious winter mornings under the heater.

And not have tiles stick to her feet or slide off the toilet.

We're off....!

Counting down until Monday May 26