So this is a sad excuse for a journal, but I want to preserve what I can still remember.  Rachael and I are considering revisiting Tuscany next spring (2025) for the first time in over a decade, and last night I woke up thinking about it and the last time we were there.  I was surprised to find that I had trouble remembering when it was exactly.  It took some time teasing it out from our other tours in Italy before I finally realized it was in the fall of 2011, a tour that began and ended in Pisa.

We have some strong memories from this tour, but it never got recorded as a journal - partly because I didn’t keep a written journal at the time, and partly because I was so disgusted with the photographs I came home with. On the fourth day of the tour Rachael and I were revisiting the remarkable ruined Santa Maria tower at the north end of Cap Corse that we marveled at on our first trip to Corsica in 2003:

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I was preparing to take a photo of Rachael approaching the tower when disaster struck.  I can’t quite mentally recreate it now, but I think I was sweeping my arm to the left for some reason and the camera just kept going, landing on the rocks with a fractured lens.  As a result, nearly the entire tour was shot with our phone camera - and phone cameras weren’t particularly good that long ago.

I like to think I’ve got a pretty fair memory for our tour itineraries, but I was surprised to see how difficult it was to recreate this one last night.  I’m pretty sure I’ve got it now though, although there are several spots where I can’t quite connect the dots or have uncertainties about destinations and possible layovers - some of it might be blurred together with memories of that first Corsican tour.

Now that I’ve recreated it as best I still can though I want to hang on to it.  I don’t know if I’ll ever publish more than this initial overview page, but if I can find our crummy batch of photos in our storage locker I’ll probably paste them in at some point and add whatever narrative detail Rachael and I can pull together.

For now though, this is it: an overview map, a list of destinations, and these few statistics: we flew to Pisa on September 15, 2011 and flew home on October 24th.  We biked roughly 1,100 miles, with 77,000’ elevation gain.  Dates within that are best guesses, because I can’t recall for sure where we stayed multiple nights and even what all of the overnight stays were.

The itinerary, as best I can recall:

• 9/15: leave Portland on the flight to Pisa
• 9/16-17: Pisa.  I think we must have stayed at the same hotel at both ends and left our suitcases there.
• 9/18: Erbelunga, after biking to Livorno and catching the morning ferry to Bastia, Corsica.
• 9/19: Macinaggio.  Hike to Santa Maria tower, destroy the camera.  
• 9/20? Nonza.  Here’s one of my questions.  I’m not certain we overnighted here.  We may have continued on to Saint Florent, as we did on our first trip to Corsica.
• 9/21-22? Saint Florent. Another uncertainty.  We may have stayed here two nights and taken a day ride through the interior.
• 9/23-24? l’Ile Rouse.  Another uncertainty about the second night.  
  We’ll go with this assumption and see how the dates line up at the end.
• 9/25: Calvi
• 9/26: Porto
• 9/27: Cargese; we may have detoured out to Capo Rosso, but I can’t be sure.
• 9/28: Ajaccio
• 9/29: Propriano
• 9/30: Zonza, after a tough climb into the mountainous Corsican interior.
• 10/01: Porto Vecchio, after a long, steep, scary descent because my brakes were metal on metal.  I got new pads there.
• 9/02: Bonifaccio
• 10/03: ferry to Santa Terisa Gallura, Sardinia.
• 10/04? Archidona.  I’m not sure we stayed here.  We may have biked through to Golfo Aranci.
• 10/05: Golfo Aranci
• 10/06: Tarquinia, after catching the ferry to Civitavecchia.  We about drowned waiting for the ferry departure.  There’s a photo of Rachael standing in the rain with her bike, if I can find it.
• 10/07: Tuscana
• 10/08-09? The Lazio lake district is pretty blurry.  I can’t remember for sure which lakes we visited.  Bolsena for sure, and I think Vico and maybe even Bracciano.  Also we took a detour to visit the remarkable Bagnoregio, either right before or after Bolsena.

• 10/10 Pitigliano.  
• 10/11: Abbadia San Salvatore, high on the slopes of Monte Amiata.  I bought a bike shirt there.

• 10/12: Pienza
• 10/13: Asciano
• 10/14: Siena
• 10/15: San Gimignano
• 10/16: Volterra
• 10/17: San Miniato.  On the way there I got doored for the only time in my life when biking through Certaldo.  I impressed myself by steering the wheel into the driver’s open door and landing almost uninjured with a graceful, rolling landing.  An angry discussion ensued with no common language to conduct it in.  He was mad because he felt it wasn’t his fault - how could he have seen me coming, since his side mirror was broken?
• 10/18: Lucca.  We were really charmed by Lucca, were sorry we were only there one night, and have been meaning to return some year.  2025 could be the one!
• 10/19: Carrera
• 10/20: Porto Venere.  We left the bikes here and took the ferry to Cinque Terre.

• 10/21: Vernazza
• 10/22: On the first layover day in Vernazza we hiked to Manarola and caught the ferry back.  On the way we watched seaplanes waterbombing a fire on the slopes we had just walked through hours earlier.  It wasn’t us.

• 10/23: on the second layover day we hiked the other direction to Monterosso and caught the ferry back.  No fires this time.
• 10/23: Pisa, by train after catching the ferry back to Porto Venere and biking to La Spezia.
• 10/24: Fly home. 

One other important point about this timeline, which I see was wrong in my records - I had us returning on 10/17, but that’s obviously wrong by a week.  To validate it I looked up the date of the great Cinque Terre flood that devastated Vernazza in 2011, an event we heard of with astonishment the day after we returned home.  The gorgeous coastal village we had just spent three nights in was totally devastated on October 25th,  just two days after we left it.

The cover photos by the way are from Tuscania and Lake Bolsena, but from our 2021 Road to Rome tour.