We’ll definitely miss each other, alright. You’ve got a great list there though. I’m particularly anxious to see Pietrapertosa. Will you be biking down the coast from Salerno? If you’re nearby be sure to make time for a visit to Paestum.

Hi Scott and Rachael,
It looks like our itinerary is about a month behind yours. We will be in Maratea on May 19th and then travel through Arenabainca, Viggiano, Pietrapertosa, Grassano ending up in Matera for 2 nights. We decided to pre book our accommodation in this area as the villages are small and the choices limited. We'll be following your tour with great interest...as always!
Dave and Anne

Hmm, I'd looked at Minervino Murge as an overnight stop for a possible route from Trani, through Montegrosso and on to Gravina.

IMHO, the meal is worth the slog back up hill to your accommodation. But you'll need to budget a few hours for the meal and have a reservation.

My haircuts are purely functional. It has to be long enough to pull back into a ponytail when I’m riding and short enough so I can manage it as it grows since my hair can get wild when not in a ponytail!

I don’t think I have either. I don’t know how that popped out.

I really meant to say Riva to Padua ...

I like the way it’s broken out separately like this. It’s own distinct small tour. I really could have posted this as two overview maps.

We’ll, the sassy part is there for sure.

It's not just Apple that plays the port game. Thinking I would be carrying my Samsung tablet last summer I bought an SD card reader with a micro-USB connector to match what was on the tablet. I never succeeded in getting the tablet to acknowledge its presence.

Then it occurred to me that I also have a card reader with a USB C plug. purchased so that I could offload photos from the camera to a predecessor tablet. It worked fine with my phone (which has a USB-C port) but not with the tablet (even after I bought the USB-C to micro USB adapter needed to try the experiment).

I ended up leaving the tablet at home and doing everything on my phone, which saved me a pound and a half of cargo weight. I just replaced my phone but haven't yet tried the adapter in the new one. Ought to get to that one of these days, I suppose, but if it doesn't work then what? (I could use the camera-to-phone WiFi app to access and transfer photos but I'm old-fashioned and prefer the physical device approach. Plus then I don't fill up the phone's storage with redundant copies of images.)

I was expecting something short and sassy, a la Sandy Duncan in her Peter Pan days perhaps...

Pageboy - haven't heard that in decades...

Riva to Garda looks very cool!

Something else in common! We had to sleep in an Italian train station also, in Florence back in 1994. The town was totally booked and we slept in the station with about 50 other unroomed travelers that night, which wasn’t terrible until about 1:30 when they closed the station and kicked us out to sleep on the grass and concrete. Which wasn’t terrible either until about 5:30, when the sprinklers came on.

That’s true, we’re not undertaking mad dashes any more. There’s plenty of slop in the schedule - short travel days and many layovers.

We’re not staying in Trani (which we’ve stayed in before) after all, as you’ll see from the updated map in the next post. We are staying inland in Minervino Murge for two nights though, which is even closer - probably close enough to drop down to this place for lunch, if we didn’t have to climb back up afterwards.

I've been rubbing my hands in anticipation for your maps! Looks like a fun trip, and it looks like you're re-visiting some familiar territory.