DI 03 San Gimignano to San Lucchese

The weather forecast was for a cloudy day but we awoke to clear blue skies and it remained that way all day. 

We leave San Gimignano.  After the long, steep climb to the town yesterday we expected to start with a downhill today. Wrong. We climbed for about 8 miles. As we climb we can see off to our right a long valley with very low hanging clouds.

This group is really getting into “cycle touring” – which is not the way most of them cycle.  The usual is some version of “hell bent for leather” with possibly nutrition bars and/or drinks while pedaling down the road. You rarely stop.  Well at Km 11 (6 miles) today we find several already stopped for cappuccino.  This is the way is should be. Naturally, the rest of us join them.

Click here for today's route, elevation profile and some pictures.

Early in the morning we couldn’t help but notice how smooth the roads were, smoother than anywhere in the US.  But this didn’t last – we ran into more “normal” roads later in the day.

At about mile 8 we begin a long, eight mile descent. From there on it’s “rolling” but this “rolling” includes at 12% climb and a 20% downhill.  For those not familiar with tandem bicycling, the downhill momentum is incredible.  Although some of us had a drum brake in addition to our normal rim brakes, it was difficult to control the speed of the bike going down such a steep hill.

In addition to vineyards and olive orchards we see fields of sunflowers and ripe tomatoes – which we sample at lunch – read on.

Although two couples are ahead of the rest of us, 8 teams manage to eat lunch at the same “bar – Pizza house” which today doesn’t have pizza.  But everyone at our table ended up with a three course meal and wine. The salad didn’t have enough tomatoes so Jim Hoyt asked for more. This dish was rapidly consumed with all of us asking “Why can’t we get tomatoes this good in the US?”  Note again that this group would never have a three course meal during a bike ride. Particularly with vino. “La dolce vita.”  Hotel San Lucchese, a former convent, is high atop a hill, a very difficult hill to climb.  Was this the most difficult climb of the day? Or was it the wine? Photo on the right above was taken from our window.

MEET THE RIDERS

DATES Ride Directors Chuck and Kris Carlson retired about a year ago. Since then they have been on Bicycle Adventure Club rides in Northern Ireland and Yellowstone National Park.  On this last ride (last month), they climbed the 11,000 foot Bear Tooth Pass in the snow.  While Kris is a very sociable person, Chuck is a detailed man who explores any and every technology. For this tour he took ViaDelSole’s GPS track log and created GPS Route files. Some of us are benefitting from this; every road and every turn are shown on our handlebar mounted GPS units.  With a “stoker” in the back reading the instructions from the route sheets and our GPS in front of us it’s difficult to get lost.  But some do.