Strada superiore
Pavia to Piacenza, 7th April
Sleeping in my tent had been a bit chilly and my bags left outside had a layer of frost on them in the morning. So much for warm Italy, this was some real Northern Europe behaviour. I got through fine by wearing all my layers, but decided to hold off on camping again until the forecast warmer days later in the week. The cold also manifested itself by covering my tent with dew, so I'd have to stop and dry it later. Despite all that, it was beautiful to wake up to birdsong and crowing roosters with a sunrise view of the river. This is what I'm here for.
Looking ahead on the EuroVelo 5 route in my offline OpenStreetMap app of choice, the next large-font town was Piacenza, which seemed likely to have somewhere to stay. A quick navigation showed it to be around 50km away, a modest step up from 30 yesterday, so I was set. Unknown to me, the cycle route I'd be following was considerably more twisty than the navigation-suggested route, so I ended up doing around 80km, much more than I'd expected. Oops!
Much of the winding and windy route to Piacenza followed the river Po on some delightfully deserted raised roads, no doubt contributing to the extra distance. A sign informed me that I was taking "strada inferiore", which seemed a little rude. Perhaps the surfacing was not always smooth, and perhaps they were more exposed to wind, but river views combined with nearly zero vehicles made them pretty superiore in my book. At a rare bench along the road I took the opportunity to have an early lunch and bask in the sunshine. No hint of the freezing night now, with the sun coming down strong enough that I was happy in a T-shirt. How ridiculous it seemed that I'd bought travel insurance for this: riding my bike in the sun and eating cherry tomatoes. Just as I began to feel guilty about how long I was lingering, I remembered I'd needed to dry the tent in the sun too. Perfect! An excuse to stay another hour with my book. I'm reading Gironimo, an English man's 2012 tale of cycling through Italy in an attempt to follow the 1914 Giro D'Italia on a suitably vintage bike with wooden wheels and wine-cork brakes. His days are comically tougher than mine and I'm greatly enjoying his suffering.
The road passed through what seemed to be some large roadworks or small quarries, and on a couple of occasions I needed to squeeze my bike around a fence or make a diversion around some heavy machinery. As I approached one fence which seemed less passable than most, I was ready to turn around when a couple of workers came up behind me in a van. One of the men, understanding my issue, generously showed me the way through to the other side and helped lift my bike over a rock that blocked the side of the far fence. Using my broken Italian, I understood that he was from 'Yugoslavia'. If this is any indication of what awaits me in the Balkans, I'm looking forward to it. As I left, he bade me a touching "vai con dio": go with God.
When I finally arrived in Piacenza, I was feeling every one of the day's 80 kilometres and was ready to do nothing for the evening. I claimed my bed at the pilgrim hostel, who had asked for my name on the phone but evidently gave up once I started spelling: my spot was labelled "Biker Inglese". The rest of Piacenza seemed uninspiring in comparison to Pavia, the main square pretty but lacking liveliness (it being Monday undoubtedly didn't help). Still, probably an improvement on equivalently sized British towns, with no exhaust-choked thoroughfare running through the centre. My opinion further improved when I ordered a single drink after dinner and also received a bowl of crisps and a plate of prosciutto and warm bread (crescentina). I'm doing it in the wrong order, but I'm a big fan of the Italian aperitivo as a way to end a night.