Day 0: Travelling Titalations

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 It’s always fun, getting to the start of a big bike ride, particularly where air travel is concerned. 

Turin - Nice is particularly fun, since we’d be flying bikes to one airport, and flying home from another one. 

Disposable cardboard boxes very much the order of the day then. 

Meeting Drew in the bar at Gatwick, we exchanged a hug and set about catching up on news since we’d last seen one another. A fair amount, as it turned out, and not all of it good. 

A week getting lost in the mountains was the perfect tonic. 

After an uneventful flight (uneventful that is apart from my inability to read a boarding card), we arrived at Turin at around 8:45pm; 45 minutes later than planned. 

As ever, my mind immediately turned to food. Airport sandwich? No thanks. Not with 2,000m to climb tomorrow. 

Instead we managed to locate our bikes from the oversize baggage and negotiate ourselves and our bikes into a taxi and enjoy a 2km / 18 euro taxi ride to our hotel, where we immediately sat down and enjoyed pasta & puddding, washed down with local non descript but very pleasant beer.

Once done, we set about putting our bikes together, pumping up tyres with the world’s most useless, and noisiest, pump before crashing out. 

Alarms set, rollout at 9am. The weather looks fine, the mountains on the horizon look ominous. Here goes nowt…






Comments

  1. KendoJuly 12, 2025 at 9:27 AM

    Good luck both! Having recently built a bike in 30 degree heat in an underground car park, you have my sympathy!

    ReplyDelete

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