April 17, 2025
Day 7 - Bologna to Longiano
With a little help from our friends
On all of our trips we try to plan in a few ‘special occasion’ destinations, usually every week to 10 days. Today is one of these.
While sitting at home mid winter in Canmore, dreaming about riding along the Adriatic coast and through the Emilia-Romagna and Marche regions and sampling the amazing food on offer, we stumbled upon a lovely little country inn, Villa Margherita and its restaurant, Magnolia, in Longiano. It’s situated about 15 km inland, tucked into the Marche hills and right near the boarder of San Marino, one of those odd independent principalities that seem to dot Europe.
This place looked perfect for our ‘pampering’ night and it was a nice flat 104 km run straight down from Bologna. That would be fine to do after a rest day.
Ah, the hubris of planning while sitting in front of a computer sipping a nice cup of coffee. Recent reality took a firm grip over the last few days as we realized that we are only travelling at 15 -16 km/hr, regardless of whether there’s hills in Lombardy or dead flats in the Po. This would give us 7 hrs plus of cycle time, so more like 9 hours total to reach our destination, probably thrashed, with about 15 minutes to get cleaned up for dinnner. In addition there’s rain in the forecast and winds from the south at 25- 30 km/hr, our direction of travel. We needed to rethink this.
Since there’s about 45 trains a day running between Bologna and Rimini basically paralleling the route we’d be riding, the prudent thing to do would be to get a little help along the way.
So that’s what we’ve done. We took a little excursion to the train station yesterday and booked a train south for noon today. There were options to go to Imola (of F1 fame) leaving us with a 70 km ride, or Forli - a 55 km cycle or Cesena with a 15 km cycle. While waiting for our number to be called to talk to an agent we were looking at various weather forecasts and by the time our number was called, we’d hit in the 30 km/hr headwind. Cesena it was!
We’re reasonably assured of arriving out our (what promises to be) very nice destination looking relatively refreshed and presentable. Time will tell.
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After a quick breakfast we set off to the ‘bike garage’ to retrieve our rides when they opened at 9:30. Our small hotel tucked into the heart of the narrow streets of old Bologna had no where to store our bikes but they got us in touch with a travel and bike rental agency a very short distance away where we could store the bikes. We had all this arranged at the time we made the hotel booking and it worked out really well. The only potential downside is that they don’t open until 9:30 and if you wanted to get moving before this, you’d be hooped. This was not a big concern for us through ;)
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Bikes retrieved, we returned to the hotel, loaded them up and then pedalled about 132 m back to the same cafe we were at yesterday for a coffee recharge and some people watching before heading off to the train station.
It was then off to the train station. We were pretty organized and arrived with well over an hour to spare. The plan was to scope out the layout, figure out where the tracks were,what platform we’d be on, if the were elevators, how to validate our bike ticket etc.
Originally our platform was #9 , however shortly after arrival that changed to #4. We found out there was only one elevator to reach the lower level where you could access the different platforms, and it was small with a pretty big queue in front of it. We decided that the quite large and relatively shallow main stairway would be fine to take our bikes down, and it was.
All was going well, we still had about 20 minutes before the train arrived. That’s when small hiccup #1 hit. There were actually three platform fours; plain old platform 4, platform 4-east and platform 4-west, all in different directions. A small slightly heated conflab ensued with K as to which one was ours when our soon to be indispensable train angel Christina came by. She confirmed that the Rimini train - the one we needed, was on simple platform 4, and she was going on that train too! Phew.
We soon had the bikes up on the platform and were waiting for the 12:18 train too arrive.
At 12:16, Christine came running up to us out of nowhere and told us that the platform had changed to #6 and we could see the train pulling in.
Holy crap Batman!!! Nothing to do but run for it and that’s when we realized that our bikes and gear are much lighter than what we used to travel with. Down the stairs, over to the next platform, up the stairs (no time for the elevator) fighting the throng of people coming down who were getting off the train, and then a quick scurry to find the train car. Luckily it was a roll-on car, and pretty empty. We were in with about 8 seconds to spare.
Why does everyone have an ‘epic train’ story when travelling with a bike?
And a huge thank you to our train angel Christina. Without her we’d still be standing on platform 4, Waiting for Godot.
Anyway, great ride, smooth, quiet and quick. It was a regional train so there were lots of stops but the train was fast (160 km/hr) between them. We were soon in Cesena and ready for today’s big ride!
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Villa Margherita and Magnolia are situated on a hilltop that looks east over to Rimini , south to San Marino and west in the Apennines. It is a very peaceful and beautiful place to spend an evening.
With the short but steep climb into Longiano we did break into a sweat but we arrived at Villa Margherita still refreshed and ready for a great evening.
Post ride bevies (we even got 2 beer !!!) on our private patio, a wonderful shower, a little blogging and we were ready for dinner.
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After a 14 km day we really hadn’t earned our post ride beers or the dinner that was to come, but we’ll consider these as dividends from past efforts and substandard roadside fare consumed in the rain.
The Magnolia restaurant is an oasis of calm perfection starting with the amazing view south west where we could see the sun setting over the mountains in San Marino. Sorry foodies, no pics of our meal tonight, it’s just not an Instagram type of place. You’ll have to settle for a single table shot and the ‘menu’ we had (taken from their website).
We had the seven course sea food focused ‘Classic’ tasting menu with wine pairings ….. that should be seven courses with a four part amuse (that was amazing) and finished up with another four part ‘you need more sweets’ addition.
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SOTD
Tilted by Christine and the Queens.
A shout out to our train saviour Christine. Nice mellow vibe that our day had (other than the platform change excitement) and the Video kind of looks like us dancing around on the platforms (just have a little imagination!)
“I’m actually good
can’t help it if I’m tilted”
Our Christine wasn’t tilted, but damn she was a good person!
Today's ride: 14 km (9 miles)
Total: 476 km (296 miles)
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| Comment on this entry | Comment | 3 |
I'm glad you made your train!
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