a long day and a bum night

Italy

Bummery is nice:
When kindness finds a garage,
You don't turn it down.

Wake up, stretch, eat a bit, head to town, eat some more, drink some coffee, get snacks for the day, and bike. That's the schedule of mornings, and today it was a bit rushed because of the distance we noticed we had to bike to make it to Ceglie for evening. We got really biking around 9 or 9.30. We had a long way to go.

The first road that we tore out of Palazzo on was amazing. It was a road that wasn't much frequented by cars (the SS 655, if you're curious), and the tailwind that we were treated to along it was astonishingly strong. We managed to go a bit over 40 km/h (about 25 mph) for about an hour. Yeah. Making time.

We arrived to Matera around 12 and ate lunch at a market (mushroom and cheese sandwiches, plus we picked up a new bottle of local olive oil), then noted the nifty cave dwellings on the way out. We tried to find a map in town, but the only place that was open after lunch was the tourism office, and their map was not really what we were looking for. The cave dwellings were pretty neat, but we only got to see them in passing.

The SS 7 (Via Appia) that headed from Matera towards Taranto (we already made the "WTF is Toronto doing here" joke, so no need for you to) was nice and flat, but we lacked the tailwind from earlier. We still got booking along it, and we followed it to Massafra, just 15 km or so before Taranto. From there, we headed up into some more mountains. Ick.

The time we made into the mountains wasn't stellar, and the light was starting to turn rich, deep red and orange colours. We arrived in Martina Franca at about 18.30, and we were crestfallen to learn that it was still another 19km to Ceglie Messapica. It was getting dark and we were exhausted... but we could make it.

Fortunately, the road into Ceglie was mostly downhill. We coasted most of the way into town, conferencing as we went about how in the hell we would find the farm. They don't have a postal address since they're too far out in the country; the only clues we had about them were that 0) it is called the World Peace Garden, 1) it is in Trattori Alfieri in Contrada Alfieri, 2) it is run by someone named Greg. We scrawled these things on a paper. We also had a mobile number for them, but after asking the man staffing the gas station to borrow his phone and ringing several times, we concluded that the phone wasn't used for some reason. Now it was dark.

We weren't sure what to do. We grabbed beers at one of the bars in town and calculated that we'd gone 190km over the day. By far the longest distance we've ever gone in a day. By far. It was little wonder that we were confused and hungry and weak. We grabbed some food at a mini market (a very weird dinner of cream cheese and spicy pepper sandwiches with yogurt and müsli) to gather our wits, then decided to ask around for the farm people. We had hoped to look them up on the Internet, since computers were provided in the bar for customer Internet use, but it turned out that these terminals were only for online betting. Sigh. Anyway, Ceglie is a smallish town, so we assumed that someone would know someone who would know the Garden people.

We approached a group of old men smoking in a park and asked in broken Italian if they knew the place on the paper because we were looking for it. They began asking us questions and discussing among themselves in a flurry. One dedicated his phone to trying the mobile number over and over, to no avail. Eventually, we answered enough of their questions that one suggested a ride out into the countryside. We were welcome to leave our bikes in his garage, and we two and three of them would go for a drive to Contrada Alfieri (they knew that area) to see if we could find the place.

Okay, so I've talked about this in previous blogs. Sometimes, the things that one does when travelling are kind of sketch, like going out into the countryside with three old men in a town in the middle of nowhere. But when you can't speak the language of a country, you're really at the mercy of its people. We had no way of getting any more information about the farm, especially not at night, and we had no place to sleep in town or out of it without that. These men seemed kind. You get feelings about people. So we went for a ride with them.

They didn't find the Garden, but they did stop at a friend's house in the area, where it was gotten across to us that the Garden was nearby, but that there was an office in town where we should go. Alright. Back into town.

We checked out the office, and it was closed, closed, closed. No one home. Our friends, the men who had driven us out into the country (Nicolas, Gaeta, and Tome) told us that if no one appeared by 23h, we were welcome to sleep in their garage. So we camped out in front of the office, eating cream cheese and spicy pepper sandwiches.

We were about 15 minutes into our wait when a man in a window popped his head out. He also didn't speak English, but we understood that he was a cyclist, too, and that he wanted us to come inside and wait out of the cold. He lived right across from the office, and we could see from inside if any lights came on in there. It was a good deal!

His name was Giuseppe, and he conversed painstakingly with us about our trip and cycling and school and jobs. We watched some Italian TV with him (it was a show about a young prince living in a monastery... we didn't get much out of it, though), and he pushed some bread and grapes and espresso on us. He told us that the "mobile" number that we had just rang in the office across the street. We chatted with him until 23h, when we made a last check for lights and headed towards the garage. Nicolas, Tome, and Gaeta showed up minutes later, and we told them the sad news and asked if it was still okay to sleep in the garage. Of course it was! We even had the choice: we could set up our tent in the garage, or we could sleep in the car in the garage. It was easier to fit everything if we just slept in the car, so here we are: sleeping in some Italian's car in his garage in Ceglie Messapica, worn to the bone from 190km of cycling over not-entirely-flat ground, and hoping, perhaps unwarrantedly, that we will find the Garden tomorrow. Somehow.