July 12, 2012
Today I shall eat my words: Mestre - Bosco Mesola
WHY IS IT that the moment I open my gob, inanities get preserved for the world to relish?
If you have been paying attention, you may remember I said it was a rare town that couldn't be entered by minor roads. Mestre, the inland town for Venice, I said, was exemplary in its kindness to cyclists.
Oh how I should have kept my mouth shut.
Getting in was simple. Getting out was dreadful. On large maps, a quiet road beside the main highway beckoned and cooed. It would have nothing but dandelions and grass in its middle and perhaps families of laughing Romanies camping on its edge.
But could we find it? No we couldn't.
We were deluding ourselves that it would be a verdant dream, of course, and it didn't come as a surprise to see it must have skirted a chemical works. But you had to be a member of some society to know how to get to it. It could be the world's first road with a password or PIN number.
Now and then there was a bike path, although its traffic was expected to go 50 metres out of the way at each of the frequent junctions and then give way to anyone coming from the side in either direction. But more often the path wasn't there at all. And then it just went for good.
Riding on this road seemed to take as long as sitting through one of Bill Shakespeare's wretched plays. It must have been less than that but it was more than lovely people like us deserved.
And then suddenly, way out of town and just before a roundabout, we saw a turning to the very end of this road we'd been seeking. And across from it a road of such quietness that our ears whistled in the silence. The relief was total.
Of the rest of the day, there is little to say. We rolled on sun-baked white-surfaced roads slightly elevated from the surrounding fields.
We cut along a path on what must once have been the original highway and earned a long hoot and a wave of friendship from a trucker 50 metres to our left.
We twisted one way and then the other to avoid the traffic and tonight, in a quiet campground, we find we have ridden 30km further from Venice than the signpost at the last junction says.
It's quiet here except for a bald and sunburned Polish motorcyclist walking up and down as he says inexplicable things into a mobile phone. He is still wearing his riding leathers as he crushes the dried and brittle grass. Which is just as well because they make him impervious to the squadrons of mosquitoes he is launching with every pace.
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