June 8, 2019
To Maria and Jack’s home, via Paestum
We’ve had a few days of limited WiFi service in a row here - it was terrible in Palinuro, and its pretty feeble here in Maratea (3 days after the day I’m finally posting here), so I’m getting seriously behind, just as the tour is winding up. I’ll cut some of the lard out of a few entries where I can and try to get caught up. This day had its share of lard, so I’ll slice right through it and get to the meat quickly.
The twenty miles south of Salerno were about the least inspiring of the tour. Flat, straight, nothing much to write home about. Also,uncomfortably warm (about 90F),and rather smoggy until we got well south of Salerno. I took only a single photo from the entire ride, of the waterfront in Salerno, and then pocketed the camera and concentrated on not getting clipped by passing cars. You know it’s a dull ride when I can’t find anything to take a photo of, and the most interesting feature was the number of prostitutes sitting on stools by the side of the road, dressed appropriately for a long day in the hot sun. In one five mile stretch I counted eight of them, for an HPM average of 1.6. I suppose I could have taken a photo of one of them, but it seemed unwise or insensitive or foolhardy or dangerous.
So, our only visual documentation of this part of the day is in the most boring parts of the video. Definitely less inspiring than the Amalfi coast.
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So, with the lard well in the rear view mirror, we turned off around noonish for Paestum, by far the most important tourist attraction on this part of the coast. Before going there though we stopped in at a cafe for a light lunch and a refreshing beverage. Cooled off, we locked up the bikes and queued up at the Paestum ticket office.
We had never heard of Paestum until planning our first tour to the region, but if you’re down this way it’s definitely worth a stop. Paestum, originally named Poseidonia, was a major Greek city and contains three (!) well preserved Doric temples dating from 450-600 BC. Like the ones at Segesta and Agrigento in Sicily, it was so surprising to find that some of the best preserved Greek temples are far from Greece itself. In addition to the three temples, there are remnants of Greek and Roman houses, walls, roads, a stadium, a Roman forum, and so on. It is a quite a large site, something nearly on the scale of Pompeii. We spent a couple of hours wandering through it, which was all the time we could afford and all we could take anyway in today’s heat; but you could really spend a long time poking around here, and finish it off with a visit to the museum.
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We’re staying for the next two nights at Maria and Jack’s home, about halfway between Castellabate and Santa Maria della Castellabate. You’ll remember Jack and Maria as the delightful tandem-riding couple we serendipitously crossed paths with back in Salento. They’re Warm Showers hosts, and generously offered up their home to us when we passed through.
It was wonderful to see them again, and to be so warmly received into their beautiful home (designed by Maria, who is a professional architect). We’ll have more to say about them tomorrow, but for today I’ll just mention the dinner party. They proposed going out to a restaurant they had heard good things of, and got on the phone with friends of theirs to assemble a dinner party.
The restaurant is quite a ways off in the hills, in San Lauro Cilento. Jack drove a roundabout way of getting there, dropping down to the coast through Acciaroli for reasons I don’t recall now - I think an errand was involved, but then dropped from the plan. Along the way they stopped to pick up a man waiting at a bus stop with a sign asking for a ride to Acciaroli. A mechanic from Bologna, he was on his way to Acciaroli for a vacation for his 33rd straight year.
After dropping off our rider, Jack took us steeply up into the hills on a narrow, tortuous road that has been used in the Giro d’Italia in the past. It was terrifying to imagine racing down this thing at high speed, in a peloton; and in fact it was pretty frightening riding in the back seat as Jack drove up, a bit like a bike racer himself.
We arrived safely at the restaurant, where the other parties - two couples, each with a delightful curly haired son aged roughly 20 months - we’re waiting in the parking lot for our arrival.
The dinner was excellent - we had a diverse set of shared appetizers, and our individual mains - I and five others had coniglio, and Rachael ordered pasta with cod and pistachio. The main thing though was the company and the experience. Conversation was largely in Italian, but most of the adults spoke at least a bit of English; and at my end of the table Jack would regularly translate or give an overview of the conversation topics. I was impressed by how open and inclusive everyone was toward us, complete strangers who don’t speak their language.
The evening also made me more than a bit nostalgic. These people feel like the folks I associated with back in the 70’s. In fact everything about the evening - including picking up a hitchhiker - felt like a throwback to the time of my young adulthood. If we lived here ourselves and troubled ourselves to learn rudimentary Italian, I can imagine they could become our friends also. It was a wonderful experience to be welcomed into their lives, if only briefly. An evening we won’t forget.
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Ride stats today: 38 miles, 1,500’; for the tour: 2,271 miles, 140,600’
Today's ride: 38 miles (61 km)
Total: 2,271 miles (3,655 km)
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