130 km covered in a blaze of speed down the Via Aurelia through Civitavecchia and into Roma - and all by 1500, giving us more than enough time to orient ourselves and locate a hostel before the tourist information desks close. The inner-city navigation proves more difficult than expected - the street layout in Roma is positively byzantine, and the confusion is not helped by the near-total lack of useful signage. Even the information desks are unhelpful; we ask the desk staff for directions to hostels in the city, and are instead given a free map without a street legend and a list of hostels located only by street addresses. Protesting, we exclaim that we are hardly familiar with the city - but they do not particularly care, and only grudgingly offer to point out the general area of one hostel way out by the Stadio Olimpico...fortunately, the roads around that area are few enough in number that we manage to locate the correct road on the map.
But what of the route into Roma? In the parts before Civitavecchia, the Via Aurelia is a fairly standard minor highway - just small enough to bike on, but flat and a shade too busy for our liking...but there is no other way, not unless we wish to make extra-long jaunts along questionably paved sideroads into the small neighbouring towns. So we zip along the highway, making good time in the slight tailwind. Once we reach Civitavecchia, we stop at the local cycling club hall to ask for good cycling routes into Roma. Before we even get inside, a man walks up to Valkyrie's bike - he takes one look at the seat and, perhaps having seen our riding posture as we came along the road, informs her in a mash of Italian and English that it is adjusted too high...
...and we enter the hall, which functions primarily as a bar; even at this time, it is full of middle-aged men knocking back Birra Moretti over chit-chat - stories of past cycling glories, maybe, but more likely mundane back-and-forths on daily life. We are clearly the only semi-lost travellers in the room, and are equally clearly not versed in Italian - so a man comes up and asks if we speak French, to which I enthusiastically reply Oui! - whereupon he laughs, explains that he does not, and proceeds instead to conduct the exchange in Spanish. The Via Aurelia, as it turns out, is the best route into Roma; past Civitavecchia, it follows the coast for some time before heading slightly inland past agricultural lands to the city limits. Upon reaching Roma, it predictably widens into a double carriageway - still passable by bike, but not exactly pleasant with trucks and such rushing past...
Roma! We have biked hard to get here. In distance - and perhaps even in mountainosity - the past week has been equivalent to the Camino de Santiago in the north of Spain: 700 km over a week, roughly 100 km a day. Our kind host in Nice laughed when we said we could cover that much in a day, and warned us that the coast was anything but flat...but we are approaching a critical mass of experience, a heady feeling of accumulated strength and endurance and downright bullheaded momentum that makes us believe ourselves equal to just about anything at this point...5000 km to go in just over two months. The end is in sight!