Ride Day 12: Valdobbiedene to Mestre

This is the last real ride day of this part of the trip.  Mestre is just a few kilometers from Venice, but neither Lorie nor I want to stay in Venice.  This time of year it is pretty busy and we have to take the bike apart, get bike boxes, etc.  So we stay in Mestre, which is just on the shore adjacent Venice.

And our route actually started from Valdobbiedene, not Follina as shown in the map.  We freelanced on our routes a bit in the past few days.

We have well and truly finished the Via Claudia Augusta!  Yesterday we had a big breakfast in Valdobieddene and got an early start under bright sunshine that promised to be hot sunshine in a few hour’s time.  Now that we’re out of the mountains it is pretty hot.  Today’s route was fairly flat, tending downhill, to Venezia.  And here we are in Venezia after finishing VCA from stem to stern.

For this final part of the VCA to the end at Altino the path is mostly gravel.  We had 120 km to go and neither of s wanted to suffer through that much gravel in the heat for our last day on the bike.  So I had set a route on our GPS that was on small roads, but which roughly paralleled the VCA.  Off we went.  It was beautiful, riding through vineyards over roads that rarely see a car.  

Leaving Valdobbiedene through vineyards

A very beautiful agricultural area

Main piazza the night before, full moon

But it was Sunday a.m. and lots of Italian cyclists were out in their club groups, all with matching kits.  Cycling is serious here.  And all of them are fascinated by our get up, the huge tandem and all.

On several occasions a group will ride up next to us and each rider in the group will ask some questions, then give us a “bravo!” as they head off.  Once, we had a group of about 10 riders coming up from behind.  The road was very slightly downhill and windy.  We rode as hard as we could to see how long we could hold them off (with 75 kg of stuff on the bike, that’s a big ask!).  We were flying though, as tandems can do when the road tips down, and the guys figured it out and it was game on!  We were holding 50 kph for several km and they were not gaining on us, but alas, the road tipped up and they were on us.  But they thought it was great fun and we had a good laugh.

Our route was very circuitous and we worried that perhaps my route setting was awry.  But as we rode into the Treviso area we got some confidence that we were headed the right way.  We stopped at a park in Treviso for a lunch of stolen rolls, meat and cheese (lifted from breakfast that morning) and enjoyed a break.  It was getting hot and a nasty wind was starting up.  We rode on, through a huge nature preserve and on dirt paths.  Sunday afternoon and thousands of Trevisans were out for a stroll.  Argh.  That slowed us down a lot since you can’t go roaring past a family of strollers.

Riding into Trevio

The ancient walled city

Our route followed the river through Treviso

Swans, too

Into a natural area with lots of Sunday strollers

We had to walk about 1 1/2 km on this foot path over a swampy area

We eventually found a roadway that was “off course” for the GPS route (and the GPS kept beeping its disapproval of our independence!) but it headed straight for the last town before the end of the VCA, Quarto d’Altino.  There, we found the last vestiges of the VCA and rode to what is the unofficial end.  No signs, no monuments, just a beep on the GPS with a message that said “You Win!”  Ha!  Not yet.  I wanted to ride the whole thing, which actually ends 10 km away in a tiny village called Altino.  So we rode the last 10 km on a road that my truck would have trouble navigating.  We made it handily and only nearly crashed a few times.  We rode into Altino with a sense of accomplishment.  We’ve ridden the bike a lot of places, and have ridden much further on tours, but this ride was by far the most intense in terms of  the passes we’ve ridden over.

Yeah! Back on the road

The final section of the VCA

It got worse...

And worse.

But always ridable.  This is the end of the VCA at Altino

Where the Romans used to dock their craft, too?

 But now we had to ride to Mestre, where we are staying to disassemble the bike and pack it up.  About 25 km away and straight into an awful wind with temperatures approaching 30 degrees.  We took it easy, save one short section on a super busy road with no shoulder that was kind of scary.  But we never cease to be impressed by the courtesy of drivers in Europe.  If there was ever a time when a car could not edge into the oncoming lane, they simply slowed down to our lazy speed (into the headwind we were holding 30 kph) and passed when it was safe.  Thank you, Italian drivers!

We soon got to our GPS route, turned off the main road and enjoyed a hot and windy, but slow, ride into Mestre and found our hotel.  We were both struck at the sheer size and hectic pace of the city.  We are used to being in the small villages and quiet roads.  But this is a big city, even compared to Bolzano!  No problem, though, as we have a nice hotel with plenty of space to pack up the box.  The bike shop that is giving us bike boxes is just down the street.

We cleaned up and relaxed a bit, then figured we might as well catch the train into Venezia – it was just early evening and we figured that Sunday night might be a good time to wander around Venezia without too big of crowds.

Venezia is as I remember it.  Interesting in the extreme and beautiful in many ways.  And very, very busy with tourists.  We had a great time wandering around for many hours, seeing what needed to be seen – Piazza San Marco, the Rialto.  And lots that was just fun to see because you can see it nowhere but in Venezia.  People watching is great, too.  Sit at a café and buy a high priced beer and enjoy the scenery as it walks by.  The city has its beauty and its rich history and is worth seeing if you haven’t.  But pick a day that will be likely to have fewer visitors than the normal day.  Even on a late Sunday afternoon the narrow passageways were tough to navigate for all the visitors.  Maybe visit mid-winter on a Wednesday morning, really early!

Here's a bunch of random shots in Venezia.

Piazza San Marco

San Marco

San Giorgio

We head to Paris later this week and we both have lots of work to catch up on.  I will try to do a post or two while in Paris, especially for stage 19 of the Tour de France from Saint-Gervail-des-Bains.  We've never seen the tour in person and are excited about it.  I promise that we won't be the guys you see on the TV with the Borat outfits or waving flags at the racers!

After that we fly to Iceland for our ride there, which we are really looking forward too, with a bit of trepidation about what the weather might do.  But we’ll be prepared for pretty much anything.

Thanks for reading.

Doug