Chalk dodging ugly weather up to your years of experience of looking towards the skies.....

There’s not much better than getting in dry on a day like this, is there? And the following day was similar. We’re pushing our luck.

Glad you managed to stay dry. And what magnificent clouds and lighting for the photos!

Yes, they seem to improve just about everything.

Oh my, we had puddles today too, but not this significant!

Ah, those wonderful pistachios!

That is nice. For the resident Great Dane, I suppose. I was so taken with the mail slot that I didn’t notice.

I like the door within a door on the right.

Oh, nice. Troll us for not having a wall!

Awesome shot! Should end up on a wall.

Aren’t experiences like that a gift though, once you’ve survived them? A day you’ll never forget.

No, I’ve never heard that before, but what a great expression! We got sucked into one the following day too. I’ll have to use it in. Sentence a few times so it imprints.

"I look at the surprisingly blueing sky and decide we should recheck the weather. Surprisingly, it’s significantly improved since we looked last and it now looks like it should stay dry for the next three to four hours - just enough!

So a second team discussion ensues, focusing around risks and probabilities. How much should we trust the weather forecast? What’s the likelihood that we’ll choose the train and then feel foolish as we watch the improved weather while we muscle our bikes on and off two different trains?"

it was on our first ever European tandem tour that a couple from Eugene introduced us to the term "sucker hole". As you're from Salem and Portland, I presume you're not unfamiliar with the term, and the concept?

We watched, and raced, a similar Puglian storm. In the end it caught us out in the open and absolutely drenched us. By the time we reached our destination town the streets were veritable torrents, running curb-to-curb with water that reached past our ankles. We were VERY glad to be wearing sandals rather than regular bike shoes: they were dry within minutes of the time we took them off.

I don't recall which religious edifice they're in, but one of them contains a collection of bones of martyrs killed by the Turks way back when. You remarked a day or two ago about fears of a Turkish invasion and they weren't unfounded: one of the martyr's skulls showed an "X" of about a dozen holes that had been bored into it, presumably when the owner was still in residence and without benefit of modern surgical steel or anesthesia.