Day 30: Matera to Venosa

October 6, 2023

Look down that lonesome road before you travel on

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Matera was the last tourist town on our journey, unless you count Roma. There's still a slight chance we'll change course and pay a visit to Napoli, a decision that'll have to be made in the next two days. It feels good to focus on the road again, to spend the night in places where we might be able to see some interesting things, but we don't feel obligated to do so.

We were a little disappointed that the included breakfast wasn't available until 7:45am, because we wanted to get an early start to this long day. We took our time packing, then rolled our bikes over to the bar two doors down from our hotel to redeem our vouchers. It's a good system, in my opinion. We like what the bars have to offer versus what a budget hotel would put together in any case.

You can see here that the bike storage area is a space behind a big fake potted plant. Camouflage!

Getting out of town involved climbing some more, followed by a long descent. We followed frontage roads along a busy highway.

This super-short bike lane was the only one on today's ride. Of course we took it!

Eventually, the route veered under the highway and to the west. I noticed what I thought was a construction barrier ahead, but it was just a crossing gate. This was the start of a long day of questions like "are we allowed to ride this road?" and "is this even a road any more?"

For now, everything was cool. We had faith -- EV5 was not going to fail us today.

This is perhaps the most elaborate crumbling roadside building I've ever seen

The game we played today was called "reset button". Every time we took a break, we pretended that we were just getting started on the ride. The trouble was that we passed through only one town today, namely, Gravina in Puglia. You've got to be careful here, because the whole town is on a slope, so backtracking carries a big energy penalty. We visited the market, failed to find a park, then happened upon this little triangle at the confluence of several streets. We ate a very early lunch, promising to stop for coffee later at any place that might happen to show up along the way.

That coffee never materialized. I wasn't surprised. I knew that today offered us, by European standards, a desolate stretch of land.

The first third of this stretch was magnificent. Almost no traffic, good roads, beautiful scenery, rolling hills. When touring, nothing matches this kind of experience. There is no stress, and you easily lose yourself in your surroundings.

We saw signs saying the the road was closed ahead, and then signs saying that the road is closed except for residents, and then signs like this saying that the road is closed, period:

The sign is obviously old. The statute it cites is almost 30 years old. What's the point of all this posturing, anyway? It has nothing to do with construction or repairs. My concern, as is always the case, is that there was a landslide or a washout or something. Maybe it's something that occurred frequently, so they just gave up on the road all together. And this obstruction would be impassible. Then I thought, well wait, the Eurovelo concept isn't that old. They wouldn't lead us astray, would they (again, I have no idea who "they" are)?

We rambled on. The road continued undegraded. We were having the time of our lives. The four or five times a car passed us, we were happy. They were proof to us that the road was passable, and by the looks of the cars, it wasn't going to require an off-road vehicle to do so.

Another great thing about this part of the ride is that the slopes were gentle. The elevation profile looked pretty ugly, but it was just one long ascent, followed by a fun and twisty descent. You could see the entire valley and surrounding hills from the crest of the climb.

We crossed a levee for a reservoir that looked mighty pitiful, then we followed what felt like a frontage road to a big highway. My guess is that they upgraded the highway by placing the new one next to the old one, and we were on the old one. Our road condition luck started to fade.

The road briefly improved when we crossed under the new highway, and there were in fact remnants of a major cloverleaf interchange here. It was puzzling, both that they'd bother to do so much work to connect the two roads, and that it had all fallen into disuse.

Man I just love faded signs like this. A little reminder that so much of what we take for granted actually requires a lot of maintenance.

We were now in questionable road condition territory. Sometimes it was just a bunch of potholes, sometimes it was whole sections of road that were missing, and sometimes the pavement disappeared all together for hundreds of metres at a stretch. Just when you'd think it was getting better, it would get worse again. We were slowly climbing again, so it didn't slow us down too much, but it was a pain to have to pay so much attention to the ground in front of you.

Lots and lots of twisted and faded signs. Rather post-apocalyptic.

One of our running jokes is about those articles that came out a few years ago about how you could buy a house in a small town in Italy for $10,000, but then you'd have to pour a bunch of money into it to fix it up. Every time we pass an abandoned farmhouse, we talk about how we're going to buy it and live there. We passed scores of abandoned farmhouses today. You'll see photos of them scattered among the assortment below.

The road improved significantly as we approached the town of Palazzo San Gervasio. We passed a resort with a restaurant, and thought briefly of stopping there to see if they would serve us some bar food. Instead, we climbed part of the way to town and took a break in yet another little triangle park. Today is triangle day!

We sat beneath the olive tree, on a rusting bench, eating whatever odds and ends were left in our food bag. A swarm of gnats would visit us whenever the winds shifted, but they didn't land on us or our food. Regardless, we didn't linger long, and we conserved our precious energy by briefly leaving EV5 for a less hilly detour. It ended up being a pretty crappy road, but at least we couldn't blame those Eurovelo guys for it this time.

Modest houses, but still a shame to see them all abandoned

I haven't mentioned the controlled burns yet. I think I was waiting for a good picture first. Here we go:

This one was obvious. They burn the fields in order to remove crop residue. Maybe there's a soil nutrient component to it as well. What I don't really understand is how they keep it smoldering so slowly. Maybe that's just the nature of whatever it is that they're burning.

The other type of burn we see is on the roadside or on the edges of a field. Everything's all dried up anyway. Why bother burning it? The burns aren't supervised, so my feeling is that if the prescribed burning doesn't cause wildfires, a carelessly-thrown match (I mean, does anyone really carry around matches any more? Ok, well, besides us when we're touring?) or lightning strike isn't going to, either.

Not so many olive trees today, and not so many grapes. More grapes as we approached Pallazo San Gervasio. A huge corporate winery as well. We saw a ton of empty fields, as well as some tomatoes. I sampled a couple out of curiousity. They were fine, but nothing really to write home about.

The road to Venosa, our destination for the evening, was very flat, until all of a sudden it wasn't. A long, twisty drop into a ravine was followed by a shorter, twisty climb into town. We had just enough gas left in the tank to handle it without complaint.

We rode over cobblestones, past a castle, and up to a cathedral to what we thought was our lodging. There was a lot of communication with our host, but it was all of the "mis" type. He had us down for another place he owns on the other side of town, and he was waiting for us there. Rather than argue, we hopped on our bikes and went to this other place, which turned out to be fine, but of course I'm still peeved that he gave me the wrong address.

But meanwhile, check out this load of grapes!

The icing on the cake was that the place was on the third floor (that's the fourth floor for you non-Italians), and the elevator was so tiny that my bike wouldn't even fit in it. So I did the hike-a-bike thing. It wasn't fun.

Of course the LIGHTER bike fits just fine

The day ended on a good note, as we found a restaurant that had great pizza and pasta. Between that and the wine, we were on cloud nine.

We pulled off the long day! I'm proud of us. We'll reap the benefits tomorrow with a 75km day. It looks to be a long and sometimes steep slog to the high elevation point of our tour, but I think we'll do all right. Plus there's a special bonus waiting for us on Sunday. More on that later. For now, it's time to finally publish this journal entry and get some well-deserved sleep.

Today's ride: 91 km (57 miles)
Total: 1,733 km (1,076 miles)

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