June 8, 2023
Ferrara to Bologna
We regretted booking a place on the 3rd floor today, even if it was half the price of anywhere else. I did 2 trips carrying panniers in 1 arm and Tobias in the other while James carried the rest of the bags and the bikes and I packed them up. I definitely got the better part of the deal.
Getting out of Ferrara wasn't pretty or easy, but I was prepared for that. The bike lanes stopped every 10m to give way to cars, and had bollards down the middle which made it hard to dodge the potholes. Finally we turned left off the busy road into a smaller country road and could breath again. It was already hot. We saw 27°C and a relative humidity of 86% on one sign. We had our first coffee stop at a bar in San Martino. I wasn't sure if they would actually serve coffee since everyone else was drinking wine, and the playground posed a few health and safety hazards, but the coffee was excellent!
From there we carried on down mostly quiet sealed roads with the occasional detour onto a busy road to get over a bridge to Malalbergo where we stopped for lunch in the park in front of the municipality building. I need to get better at drinking water with Tobias upfront but I hadn't touched my bottle all day and was feeling it so popped into the store for sweet beverages. While we were having our picnic we had so many people come say hi, including one women who bought us a huge bag of chocolate cookies. There was even a water tap to top up our bottles. It's really nice to pass through more towns that have the things we need in them.
After lunch our route got a little more off-road up on a bank opposite the road. The timing was unfortunate since we like to cover as much ground as possible while Tobias sleeps. We don't exactly ride slow while he's awake, but for me especially I feel like I can actually focus on riding and the world around me while he's asleep. He likes to talk and sing, and if you don't reply or acknowledge him he just gets louder and louder until you do. Today's obsession was a helicopter slide that has a little house that his uncle Josh is going to make him (according to Tobias, sorry Josh). So the road was beautiful but half my mind was stuck thinking that we needed to cover more ground.
We joined some small roads for a bit then detoured off into Oassi La Rizza, a wildlife reserve. It seemed to be a place for birdwatching because we saw some people with very big cameras, but it wasn't the best for bike riding. We joined the path along the canal again, but our patience had run out so we cut across to the road and flew down there for a while. Unfortunately by this point Tobias woke up so we stopped at an orchard for some cherries and nectarines then carried on with him up front.
It's a bit easier riding rough stuff with Tobias on my bike because I can dodge potholes easier. James has to deal with 4 different wheels that don't line up while I only have 2. The going was better for a while with a few more ups and downs. I saw several very large rodents that looked like an oversized rat, including one squashed one that did not smell very good. Eventually we were forced off the bike path by a tree that would have taken too much effort to get our set up through, so we rerouted to the busy roads to get into town.
By this point Tobias was okay, but only if I kept singing him silly songs about his maaier, weed whacker, leaf blower, and helping his grandad ken on the farm so I wasn't much help to James as he tried to make sense of Bologna's cycle network. We occasionally found great cycle paths, then they disappeared. We had one short stop at a park only 6km from the end while he regrouped and I found something else to distract Tobias other than my voice. After we got through the busy centre everything got a bit easier and our main concern became the darkening skies, strong wind, and noisy thunder. Luckily it didn't eventuate to much and we didn't get wet today.
Our apartment is great, and on the ground floor. The only problem is the owners 3 dogs who really don't like our bikes. There was a supermarket just around the corner so we picked up supplies and cooked at home. Tomorrow we will explore Bologna and suss out the train station.
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Today's ride: 61 km (38 miles)
Total: 1,425 km (885 miles)
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