July 3, 2012
Meeting Mike the Bike: Tirano - Valdisotto
A SMILING MAN with a shaven head grinned us a welcome when we arrived at our camp-site tonight. The last time we saw Mike Musto was in a bar in Vancouver, where he lives (Vancouver, that is, not precisely the bar) after we had ridden across the USA and then started up towards the Canadian Rockies.
Mike is a Crazyguy, which is how we met, and little by little the plan developed that he would join us in Italy and ride the Stelvio before turning back down to southern Italy to meet his Italian cousins.
"I speak the Italian that I drag up from my youth," he said, "but it is the dialect Italian that my family spoke. I've lived in Canada for almost all my life and so it's hard to remember. And it's so much of a dialect that I can't understand TV Italian at all."
Mike warned us we would get to the campground only after a 10 per cent hill. I scoffed, rarely believing the steepness that road builders signal. But, yes, this was 10 per cent. The sign said so and we believed it.
But there was joy in our efforts. For we had barely rounded the slight bend that announced the beginning of the real gradient when, beside the road, we spotted small angular stones laid out to spell LEO.
Now that is what I call a welcome.
Tonight we are at a campground where Mike has been awarded, simply for being a good guy, a wooden cabin for the night. But then that sort of luck runs his way. The other day he made friends with a cyclist along the road, "a real Giro d'Italia type", who after a conversation invited him to spend the night at home with his family. And then the village mayor turned out to join him for dinner.
Mike was modest: "It sounds grand but the mayor was really just one of the boys." But it doesn't happen to others whereas it did happen to Mike.
Tomorrow we tackle the Stelvio, the second highest paved col in the Alps, after the slightly higher Iséran in France. It is dominating our thoughts.
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