Day 58: Venzone to Udine

June 9, 2022

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There was thunder, lightening, and heavy rain in the night and by morning it was still coming down. It's not a big deal, as we put on our waterproof gear and dragged our bags to the covered carport where the bikes were waiting to be loaded. Late in the evening, three quite old German touring men had arrived, and now they joined us in the carport. That was fine, except that they were smokers. Smokers by now understand that they can not smoke indoors, but they seem to feel that as soon as they are outdoors, even right by an entrance, or in this case, in a car port, it's a puffing free for all. We had to shut them down, which may have reduced the comradery a bit.

Quite soon after we took to the trail we encountered the first of what would form a theme for today's ride - plants that are associated with the south, showing that we have made real progress into another ecozone. First up was a plantation of olive trees., certainly indicative of a southern climate. And then there were ripe cherries! There was a long row of large trees, hanging over the roadway. Fair game!

We had read in other blogs that a lot of the route here was gravel, and we can confirm that. In our case, with the rain, it was wet gravel, with puddles of unknown depth. The one below was deep enough that after watching me go through, Dodie decided to walk it. Not looking for a swim today!

There will certainly be some plusses in our description of the ride today, but overall it did not score highly. The main problem was the combination of the fact that the route wiggles this way and that, far more than other cycle routes we know, and that signage was often missing or weak.

For example, see the direction arrow pasted to the post in the photo? Yeah, neither did we!

Weak signage means that Dodie needs to keep a constant eye on the GPS, which actually makes for a tiring ride. The route also travelled through a diverse mix of often rough road types, on road cycling situations, and generally boring landscape. To this we would add the fact that in about 45 km of cycling out of Venzone, there were no places to buy food. No bakeries, no groceries. In two spots we did see large clusters of our German fellow cyclists (in particular there was one group of 32 out of Stuttgart). They had found two "bars", which seem to be the main form of organization for getting food in these parts. But these were dark, crowded, indoor affairs, and not for us.

If you look at the track map above, you will see broad blue band heading south toward the Adriatic. This is the river Tagliamento, and it is a broad and major thing. Poor signage gave us a brief run-in with it, as we erroneously got on a bridge to cross it. At this point the wind was so severe and the bridge so exposed that it was just barely safe to keep riding. We really risked being blown right off.

We continued to kind of struggle with the route, finding the going just a little rough and the scenery a little boring. I tried to look at it with fresh eyes and to ask "What's wrong with this?", but though there was nothing wrong, it just lacked Wow.

Fairly nice church standing alone in a town.

As we rolled along, maybe a little glumly, two things began to increase and come into focus. The first had begun last night, where our stop was suffused with the most heady perfumed scent. This continued during this day, and we began to try to localize which tree or shrub was producing it. We decided it was mainly honeysuckle, assuming that this is honeysuckle:

But there was another, similar scent, that I thought came from a tree. We didn't localize that one.

Together with the scents, there were increasing plantings of flowering trees and shrubs, and of course flowers of all kinds. We noticed great drifts of hydrangea, tree roses, and wisteria, plus many not recognized. With the rain, I didn't try to photograph all the many kinds.

But there was one dramatic tree with large white flowers. What is this?

Palm trees, also iconic of the south were also much in evidence.

Here are some more shots of flowering shrubs, including some encore appearances.

The second increasing and more focussed phenomenon was the prevalence of the typically crumbly but stylish Italian buildings, usually done up in "fruit" colours, like mango, peach, or raspberry. This was most evident when we reached Udine, but we saw this increasing as we progressed south.

Fruit coloured buildings in this and the following photos - apricot, lemon, peach.

The photo above also shows ribbon decorations on posts. There were a lot of these in some places. Is it possibly related to a religious celebration?

Even as we began to enter the outskirts of Udine, we were not spotting any bakeries, or places that we recognized as food sources. It turns out that a fixation on bakeries is wrong for Italy. We did end up finding three. Two were closed, mainly because it was mid-day (when people might be hungry), and one had stuff so amazingly weak we could not have bought it anyway - like white bread sandwiches with the crusts trimmed.

Of course what we did find was pizza. Pizza here is of course the schnitzel of Germany or the hamburger of USA. Pizza places have it pre-baked and set out in large slices on the counter. They will quickly re-heat the flavours you choose. Price is about 2 euros per slice.

Dodie declared our first two slices to be much better than at the restaurant the other night. But later in the day we had to go for another two, and though they were just as good, Dodie declares she does not want to see pizza again for a couple of months!

We found our hotel in Udine - the Friuli -and installed ourselves in our fifth floor room. The bikes joined the by now expected huge grouping in the cycle garage. The garage is quite small for the number of cycles, and maybe we will have trouble extracting ours tomorrow morning.

We then set out for a short stroll around the town. We didn't have a map of tourist hot spots, and so we just wandered a bit. Of course we did this with some gelato, which was easy to find, but other food options (other than bars and formal restaurants) did not jump out at us. As shown above, we especially noted the slightly crumbly and pale fruit coloured buildings. Some really do seem to belong in paintings:

We saw that there are many churches in the town, but only stopped in at one - the church of Saint Giacomo. It was suitably ornate and painted. One painting showed three women, one holding an incense burner. The woman on the right seemed to have a particularly realistic expression. I she wondering why are we using up so much incense today? And why does she have a skull at her feet?

Only when we were pretty much walked out did we come upon some of the main monumental buildings of the town.

The loggia del lionello is a palace currently filled with art works. It was built in 1492 and subsequently damaged or destroyed by earthquake and fire, and rebuilt/restored.

Across from the loggia del lionello in the square are several statues, like the statue of Hercules.

We totally missed the Cathedral, and only later found a web site - 15 Best Things to Do in Udine. Oh well, we were happy with our little outing. It does look a little staggery, doesn't it?

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Back in our hotel, we could also look out the window. Unfortunately we can not open the window fully, so it's stuffy in here. Probably they do not think we will jump, but we might drop stuff on people's heads?

What gave Meaning to Life today? The heady aroma of flowering shrubs.

Today's ride: 57 km (35 miles)
Total: 3,288 km (2,042 miles)

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