Yum! We add to our gastronomic delights today a litre canister of olive oil and a half-litre of local vino rosso in stoppered glass bottle; much later, we learn that we were certainly stiffed on neither, for the oil is rich in taste - especially with our balsamic, cracked pepper, and sea salt - and the wine is fantastic. For all the other luxuries we must forego on this trip, we do not lack for good food...
...waking up by the beach this morning, a light dusting of mostly dried rain on the tent. Exhaustion is starting to set in, that sort of multi-day pedal-to-the-metal exertion haze that creeps up on you after a few long days no matter how much sleep you get. The going has been hard - mountainous, long, even hot sometimes - and we can't wait to reach Roma...but, as of this morning, there are still 310 km to go. The Via Aurelia, less poetically known within the nomenclature of the Italian highway system as SS 1, starts of course in Roma, and thus its kilometre markings indicate the distance to that ancient centre of Empire...
The coastline is sparsely populated out here in Toscana, unlike in Liguria where the cities and towns must crowd themselves between shore and mountains, their homes and shops terraced up the hillsides as tightly as possible. Most of the relatively flat land here has been given over to agriculture, this being one of the few places with enough space for sprawling croplands. The beaches, by contrast, are coated with mostly European tourists, their EU licence plates forming an alphabet soup - PL! NL! D! A! and the ubiquitous I - of country abbreviations.
As for the oil and wine, we get these in a small shop in a small town along the Via Aurelia. The owner sees that we are riding in on bicycle. His eyes perk up; he asks us where we are from - I am outside at the time, so Valkyrie answers that she is American. There is another famous American who lives in this area - a cyclist, supposedly - and so his excitement is redoubled; he passes us a free juice from the store's cooler, asking about our trip and how far we are going and why exactly in God's name we would decide to go from Copenhagen to Istanbul via Portugal. It is wonderful to be in a place where people so frequently take an interest in our travels, even if only for a passing moment...
...we continue on, passing by some more unremarkable road through the countryside - well, no road that offers a view of either mountains or sea can be truly unremarkable, but these roads are flat enough that the familiar hypnosis of road travel - regardless of your means of transportation - soon sets in. We lose our way briefly, crossing the highway in the wrong direction before we check the map and right ourselves with a couple of carefully-chosen turns...
...and we come to stop up towards the mountains along the inland route to Grosetto; our map indicates the ruins of an Etruscan necropolis along this route, which we hope to see tomorrow - on our continued journey into Roma! Each destination is a new trip within the larger trip, another stretch of distance and time and effort and money and experience...and this one is drawing to a close, to be followed shortly by our travels into Napoli and across the boot into Bari.