To Comacchio

May 13, 2023

We’ve been worried about the weather for this day, hoping we’d get enough of a break in the rains for today’s ride. We don’t need much - it’s a totally flat twenty miles from Alfonsine where we’ll get off the train to Comacchio. Last night it looked like we’d get one later in the afternoon today, and we envisioned hanging out in the Alfonsine train station for a few hours waiting for it. This morning though it looks like we could get a break right when we get off the train if we’re quick about it. So that’s good, if it pans out.

The other thing we have to worry about this morning is the train ride itself, because we always worry about train rides. It’s short, but there’s a transfer involved in Ravenna; so we have two trains to board and off board from, and a connection to make. So many things could go wrong - we could have trouble boarding or getting off in the short time the train will be in station, we might not find the right car for the bikes, we might miss our connection, blah, blah, blah.

So it’s really a nice change that the first train is probably our easiest boarding experience ever. In a surprise to us, it turns out that the train from Pesaro to Ravenna is a short run that’s precisely sized for us. It begins here, it ends there. The train is already in the station when we arrive twenty minutes before departure, so it’s a snap finding the right car for the bikes. And, at a time when we don’t really need to rush loading, we’ve got a modern train with a straight roll-on with a wide door and no stairs involved.

In the Pesaro station. Easiest boarding ever.

So that’s the first leg down. We’re not too concerned about making our connection because we’ve got a scheduled twenty minute layover and our first train arrives in Ravenna exactly on time. Still, we’re not ones to push our luck. We get off quickly, load the panniers on the bikes and then Rachael checks which track our next one departs from while I look for the elevator to the sottopassaggio. I’m disappointed to see there is none and that we should have left the bags off the bike because we’ll have to take them off to carry the bikes down and up stairs when Rocky reports the happy and surprising news that we’re already on the right platform. We arrived on platform five, and we depart on platform five.

It takes us a few minutes to realize the train we arrived on isn’t going anywhere. I wander down to the other end and ask the engineer if this train goes to Ferrara. He nods, so I go back to Rachael and we rather sheepishly take the bags off the bikes and roll them back on the same train we just got off from again.

It’s dry when we arrive in Alfonsine and bike out of town. There’s nothing to this tiny town, and within a minute we’re out in the country biking beneath a dike on one side and a broad vista filled with corn fields, their stalks looking like they must have just pushed up through the soil in the last week or so. We’re back in the Po valley again, and won’t have a significant Hill to climb until we meet up with Suzanne and Janos on Lake Garda three weeks from now.

We’ll be seeing a lot of landscapes like this in the coming weeks. Probably a lot of skyscapes like this too, from the look of the long range forecasts. It’s turning into an unusually wet spring in Italy.

It’s a good thing that it’s a flat, short ride and that we don’t need much of a break in the weather, because we’re sure not getting much of one. About seven miles in it’s apparent that there’s fearsome rain building up to our left, and for the rest of the ride it’s a race to the nearest shelter as we ride right along the seam of the front. On the left, it’s black, to the right it’s blue.

Fortunately or unfortunately, we’re in the Po Valley - it’s totally flat, but it’s totally exposed to the elements too. In other words, the nearest shelter is our lodging in Comacchio, still thirteen miles away.

It doesn’t help that we’ve got a few miles of unsealed road to slow us down.

The seaward view looks pretty encouraging.

I love the look of roads like this because they add so much texture.

Unfortunately, extra texture on the road surface isn’t really what the situation calls for today.

We’re riding right beneath the seam in the sky. So far so good.

At least we’re back on pavement again and the miles go fast. Note that there’s not even a small tree we might try to huddle beneath for miles.

With the memory of intense rainstorms (and hail!) still fresh in our minds, we have all the incentive we need to keep making tracks. I stop a few times for photos and lag behind Rachael, yelling to her as she passes by that we’ll just meet at our room if she stays ahead. Not long after though the first showers arrive and I catch and pass her stopped by the road putting on her pannier covers. As I race past she hollers out to me this time to stop and protect the phone so it doesn’t get water damaged; but I don’t care about the damn phone at the moment. I care about me not getting drenched, so I keep going hoping I can ride out from under the storm’s leading edge.

Lucky this time, we do break out from under the clouds again without really getting wet; and about two miles from Comacchio the road rounds the end of the lagoon and bends toward the sea, and we realize we’ll be fine. And the phone will be too, we’ll find out in time (and a good thing for me that it is, or I’d still be hearing about it). We back off the throttle and relax a bit, and soon we’re letting ourselves into our self check-in room.

The wall opposite the entrance to our room.

I’ll say this for the room we’re staying in: it’s a real bargain, and it’s well located in easy walking distance to the center. And the hard tile floor works well when it’s time to wheel our bikes inside. That’s it for the 🙂 half of the review though. On the ☹️ side, it’s got the most miserly furnishings of anyplace we’ve stayed that I can recall. There’s the double bed with a small night stand on one side, and a single second bed. Period. It makes it difficult to organize our belongings when they start exploding out of the panniers. Really, there’s no place to put anything except on the extra bed or the floor.

This might be the most spartan room we’ve ever stayed in.

In retrospect, I think this is probably the reason I forgot to pick up my camera when I step out of the room to go for a photo shoot of the town before the rains return - with no good surface to lay out gadgets and devices to pick up when we go outside, there are no visual reminders. Too late, I realize I’ve locked myself out with the camera on the other side of the door and Rachael still walking back from her excursion to the grocery store with the one set of keys in her purse.

I call Rachael on the phone to see how far off she is and then wait for five or ten minutes for her to arrive. No big deal, and an opportunity to learn something about managing our stay here. As soon as she arrives I grab the camera and I’m off for a walkabout through this exceptional, unique place.

There are dozens of trabucci lining the canals around town.

It’s great to see Comacchio again. Of all the places in Europe that market themselves as a Little Venice, Comacchio is the only one we’ve seen that really merits it.

I like how many of the canal-side doorways have curtains hung in front of them.

The laundry should dry out quickly, if the rains hold off long enough.

Bike rental outfit. There are plenty of bikers about, enjoying the flat terrain and the paths along the canals.

When I come to the restaurants, I’m surprised to look look up ahead and see Rachael taking photos of menus. There are a half dozen of them within a few yards of each other that are either still open for lunch or look likely to be open tonight. We check them out together and then head back to our room for the afternoon.

This is so different from when we were here in the fall of 2020, in the height of Covid when almost no one was about and nothing was open. Comacchio was almost the endpoint of that truncated tour, which was abruptly cut short when a fresh outbreak of the disease forced the shutdown of the country almost overnight. That was quite an experience, scrambling to get a flight home from Bologna and get our suitcases shipped north from Bari where we’d shipped them just a week earlier to wait for us there to catch a ferry to Greece.

It’s a small place, so it’s not a shocker to run into each other like this.

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Ride stats today: 21 miles, 200’; for the tour: 1,137 miles, 58,300’

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2023 Bird List

150. Common moorhen

Today's ride: 21 miles (34 km)
Total: 1,132 miles (1,822 km)

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