The 9/11 Tour
Some tours burn larger and more clearly in our memories than others. This was one of the big ones, which is a good thing because it’s also one of those tours with no written journal so we’re relying only on memory and photos. Fortunately I find a full repository of photos in our backup drive, and for whatever reason our entire itinerary is very clear in my mind still. 22 years later, I have no doubts about which towns and cities we overnighted in, where we stayed multiple nights, and in general the routes we followed. Who knows why this one has lasted so clearly in my mind, but we’d better leverage the memories before they start blurring like so many others.
We remember this tour well for many reasons. First visit to Tuscany and Umbria! First visit to Croatia, which back then felt especially exotic and adventuresome because the Croatian War of Independence had ended just a few years earlier and Dubrovnik was still badly scarred from the siege that left so many of its structures in ruins.
Perhaps we remember it as much as anything though for the fact that we were in Orvieto on 9/11, puzzling in our restaurant at dinner that night over what the apparent consternation was with a bike touring group on the far side of the room. A tour with many hooks to hang memories from.
This was another old-tech tour. We used paper maps, which I can still picture in my head and probably still have in the map box in storage. We might have mail-ordered them, but I think I remember driving up to Powell’s Books from Salem to get them. We had cyclometers (the simple, early ones that just measured speed and distance), which I’m certain of because I was shocked to see that the wires had been clipped on them on the flight home, presumably because security was protecting against bomb threats.
And we were still packing the bikes in cardboard bike boxes, because I can remember the challenge of finding ones in Dubrovnik and getting them back to Villa Dubrovnik, a seaside resort south of the city that still ranks as one of our finest stays ever.
And we were a fair bit younger then. It’s long past time that we got around to this, so let’s see what some photos and blurry memories can tell us about that month long ago before they blur even further.
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