HERE WE GO AGAIN!

Our New Tent

At long last the Touring Turtles are taking off for more two wheeled travel. Since returning from Europe in the fall, we’ve been sidelined by various health issues but, having healed or at least adapted to the inconveniences of creeping decrepitude, we are preparing to hit the road again. In 3 days we’ll be leaving on a five month trip to New Zealand. The first 2 months (summer/fall in NZ) will be bike touring, starting on the South Island and ending on the North. Then we’ll spend 3 months in a very small town on the northern end of the North Island while Michael learns to speak Kiwi and I work as a locum  tenens in a rural clinic serving mostly Maori.  This will be my chance to see what its like to practice medicine without worrying how to get my patients the things they need because New Zealand has a universal single payer (government financed) health system.   They spend about a third of what the US spends per capita on healthcare and  rank above us in health system quality, access, efficiency, equity, and outcomes. http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Publications/Fund-Reports/2010/Jun/Mirror-Mirror-Update.aspx

At this stage of imminent departure we are stressed with all the things to do before leaving on an extended trip and scared to be heading out into the unknown at a time of life when, rather than aspiring to ever greater physical feats, we’d be grateful if we could just repeat the things we did before. We reassure each other that we are turtles. We’ve got our home on our rack and can pitch our new tent (more on this later) wherever we are when we want to stop riding for the day.

Trip preparations for Wendy always include some digression into creative gear improvement. We wore out our last tent in Europe and needed a new one. Living in a tent for 3 months last year taught us what to want in a shelter. We were particularly jealous of the Europeans who could stay dry cooking meals on rainy days while we had to get drenched for dinner to avoid setting our American made, not very smart tent on fire. Our new tent had to meet the following criteria: 1) light  2)  rain porch 3) unobtrusive color for stealth camping purposes 4) erectable without stakes when the ground is hard as cement  5) not too expensive. After much research, we bought an ultralight tarptent from a cottage industry in Grass Valley. It’s basically a rainfly with mosquito netting and a floor. It had a small rainporch so I made it bigger.  It was also designed to be held up by trekking poles so I had to substitute tent poles made with parts salvaged from previous tents. It came without a footprint (groundcloth) so I made one with Tyvek donated by the construction crew down the road.

I also had to go back to the drawing board on last year’s innovation, the bikepack, which adds shoulder straps to our panniers, converting them to backpacks. The original version was hard to put on, easy to fall off, and if you made it through the former and avoided the latter, you had a metal hook sticking into your back.  We plan to do some hut to hut hiking in NZ (they call it “tramping”) so I came up with a more stable and comfortable arrangement.  So in addition to the excitement of the trip, I have great anticipation to see how these modifications turn out.

I also spent a lot of time figuring out electronic stuff, something I never had the time or patience to do when I was working. I got an iPhone that we’ll use just for internet where there’s wifi and loaded it up with Skype, Warmshowers and medical apps for my locums.  I’m pretty sure I’ve successfully loaded New Zealand maps onto my GPS and have pared our rats nest of gadget chargers down to a solar battery charger with a USB port for output.  I made plastic case to protect the charger from the elements and velcroed it to the tent bag so it can charge while we ride. I also set up a Skype phone number that counts only as a local call if you call from the 707 area code and has voicemail so you can call and leave us messages.  The number is (707) 840-4460.

We met a lot of fine people interviewing for housemates and found a wonderful young man, Brian, and his great dog Digby who will care for our animals while we are away and whom we look forward to living with when we return. Michael has the tandem dismantled and packed in its cases. We’re dragging out the camping gear. Soon we’ll be down to the really important stuff like picking out the most festive color of nail polish. Then to Oakland by bus and LA by train. So hasta la vista, nasvidenje, arrivederci. Next stop: 5 days in Fiji.

Did We Learn Anything? Yeah, Biking is Fun!

Train station, Koln (Cologne) Germany at 4 am

Uncertainty is both the fun and the scary part of an extended bike tour. For a journey this long, you can’t make plans or control all the variables. The trick is to be flexible, stay open to the experience, and keep on laughing.  Basically no great revelations, just a refresher course in Life 101. Here are the big ones:

1) Most of the bad things we worry about don’t actually happen.

2) Most people are good.

3) Plans are just one set of possibilities generated by our limited imaginations. Life is real and full of surprises.

4) We need much less stuff than we think.

5) We’re limited more by our minds than our bodies. We can do more than we think.

We hope you enjoyed reading about our tour and perhaps were inspired to create an adventure  of your own. Adios, auf wiedersehen, au revoir, salaam, ciao. Now we’ll give Michael the last word and then set this blog aside until our next big adventure.

New Friends and Odds and Ends

part of the Alhambra in Grenada

We spent our first and second nights in Spain with Mandy from Warmshowers. She introduced herself stating that she’d not tried bike touring yet, but was planning to do her first bike trip… solo…in Morocco. My initial reaction was to persuade her to start with something less ambitious, but I bit my tongue which was good because it turns out this woman can do whatever she sets out to do.  A multitalented longtime British expat, former truck driver, horse trainer and yacht captain, she is currently out of work, as even the wealthy are tightening their cummerbunds. Extremely generous with her time, she took us on a bike ride, a supermarket tour, and to a great outdoor gear store where Michael was finally able to get a new air mattress, after a variety of substances; including seam sealer, tire patches, shoe glue and wetsuit repair goo; all proved unequal to patching up the old one.

Mandy

Andalucia turns out to be full of Brits, possibly due to nearby Gibraltar, whose residents speak an amalgam of English and Spanish locally known as “Gibberish”.  A few days down the road, we couchsurfed with David, another British expatriot who divides his time between Andalucia and Northern Arizona.  A very social and hospitable fellow, he showed us his Japanese  squirting toilet and  added us to the expanding  guest list for a great dinner party at which we met more residents of Gaucin,  a village formerly known as a haven for bandits and rebels.

David

We stayed two days with David and did a park ‘n ride on a really beautiful back road up to yet another white village.  Almost all the white villages we encountered were perched high on slopes or summits. They each have a central plaza with a spring fed fountain so I’m guessing their locations were based on the availability of water. The land is very dry and looks a bit like the high desert of New Mexico.

Leaving David’s place took us through Gaucin on market day, where we discovered chirimoyas, a delicious fruit which is green outside and white inside with large black seeds.  Later we rode through a village where people still live and work in caves. We met a young man who left the village for the city, like most young people do, but returned when he got laid off to work in the family pig business. We sampled smoked pork from his free range acorn fed pigs, which is only sold by the haunch. Purchasers hang them in their kitchens, and pare off a little bit at a time.

Mixed use cave: bar and shops below, and apartment above

At Ronda we checked out the bullfighting ring and museum, looking for insight into the mass appeal of this cruel sport but not finding it. That evening we were in a bar where a bullfight was on TV. All the tourist women, me included, were rooting for the bull who, with our encouragement, manage to gore the matador in his thigh, lifting him up bodily on his horn. The matador kept on bullfighting but we’d had enough and didn’t stay to watch him get even.

Typical arid landscape with olive trees

The cycling part of our journey ended in Antequera, a small city on a high cliff with a history dating back to the Bronze Age.  Above the town is a large fortress built by the Moors that fell to a siege by the Christians in 1410.  Michael and I both read  The Hand of Fatima on this trip and were on the lookout for signs of Moslem influence as we travelled. We didn’t find much until we got to Antequera, where you can still see the Moorish baths and find features of the former mosque in the Catholic church which was built around it.

Antequera church in which you can see features of the mosque that predated it

Antequera also has two dolmens, large stone structures which are feats of Neolithic engineering, that were used for ceremonials and burials.

This dolmen is actually quite roomy inside.

From Antequera we took the train to Grenada, where we stayed in the apartment of our friends Fred and Carol. We visited the Alhambra, a group of ornate Moorish palaces built for the last of the Muslim leaders and finally got some Moroccan food in “Arab alley” (my term), a narrow street sort of like a Chinatown, lined with shops selling harem pants and tea houses with hookahs.

detail of wall niche, Alhambra

Tilework detail at Alhambra

From Grenada we took the train to Malaga, where we missed our plane to Dusseldorf because they couldn’t figure out how to fit our tandem in the x ray machine. Got a later plane to Cologne in the middle of the night,  train to Dusseldorf, bike to our friend Thomas (navigating in dark by GPS) who had our bike cases in safekeeping, plane to SF, Greyhound to Arcata, and fell into bed more exhausted from the 48 hour trip with no horizontal sleep than by 2000 miles of cycling.

Fight global warming, drink wine. The cork bark is peeled off the tree trunks every 9 years.

What goes up must come down, and up, and down, and up …in Andalucia

Generation gap.

Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit I hollered as we zoomed down 7 km of steep switchbacks, losing in 40 minutes all the altitude gained during a solid  half day of ascent.  We took this turnoff to reach the a campground and now I deeply regretted getting distracted by the dance festival at the last village and forgetting to fill our water bottles, thus making wild camping an even less attractive alternative.

We had been riding through yet another of the numerous white villages (whitewashing all the buildings originated with Franco but is now traditional)  and heard music accompanied by the staccato of stamping feet. Ever up for a diversion, we followed the sound to a plaza where community teens were putting on a show. There was flamenco in traditional costumes, with half the girls taking the man’s role while their actual male contemporaries slouched around in the periphery. Then there were girls in short shorts gyrating in near synchrony to American rock, causing the teenaged slouchers to slouch nearer.  Now it is getting dark and I curse all the way down to the campground and until a rowdy group of boy campers finally shuts up at 1 am. Clearly we made a wrong turn.

Young flamenco dancers

But the next morning we found another way back up via a beautiful back road that took us by La Pileta cave where the park rangers take people on cave tours a la Indiana Jones to see 5,000 year old cave paintings.  Illuminated only by our kerosene lanterns they probably look much the same as they did to the neolithic inhabitants who created them. Oh, and the rangers also sell beer. Without that cursed descent, we would have missed the whole experience.

White village

Michael preparing for cave tour

We Turn Sea Turtle and Take a Low Rent Cruise Where Wendy Sleeps with Twenty Men

Waiting to board ferry in Genoa

As delightful as it was to fly along unencumbered, the park ‘n ride strategy and the cumulative effect of general dawdling left us fairly behind in our itinerary. We decided to skip France and head to Spain. The least expensive way to reposition ourselves was to take a 2 day ferry trip from Genoa to Tangiers, and another short ferry to Algeciras. This was attractive not only because of the price but also because it allowed us to relax and not worry about missing the 6 train changes we would have had to make if we’d gone by rail. It cost $200 apiece without a sleeping cabin and $500 with, so we took the cheaper option.

Our vessel had clearly seen better days. It had an empty swimming pool covered with chickenwire  and kind of faded plush decor in the area shared by the cabin customers. The section upstairs reserved for us steerage passengers was decidedly more utilitarian. There were several rooms with rows of seats like a movie theater with raisable armrests. Everyone brought blankets and people slept lying across the chairs or on the floor. We brought our own groceries and everyone ate at the little cocktail tables in the faded lounges.  We had showers, but after any use, the carpet become sodden all the way down the hall.

There were a scattering of tourists and Europeans on board but most of the passengers were Moroccan and provincial me was surprised to see that northern Africans aren’t black. For the first night, between Genoa and Barcelona, our sleeping room had me, Michael, and about 20 Moroccan gentlemen. They were all very polite but since we didn’t speak French, we couldn’t really communicate. More women and children boarded the next day in Barcelona, and one of each was added to our sleeping quarters, which made it feel a little less weird. We were clearly entering another culture. The women all wore head scarves covering their hair. There was even a mosque on one of the lower levels. I wore my only pair of long pants for the whole trip, since shorts felt quite inappropriate.

Wendy's turn for the deck chair, this is the life!

The seasick meds we bought before leaving turned out to be unnecessary on the flat sea and we spent our time reading in the sun, taking turns with the other hundred passengers to use the only two deck chairs onboard. While Michael was responsible for our money and documents, I carried the handlebar bag with our camera, maps, and GPS. Even though it had a shoulder strap, I lost the bag twice during the trip and although many of our fellow passengers were much poorer than ourselves, the bag was returned both times intact to the lost and found.

We arrived after dark at the Tangiers port, still not speaking French and were surprised to learn that the city was still 20 km away.  We were reluctant to ride that far in the dark and I thought someone told us there was a campground 5 km away, but there wasn’t,  just a small town with men hanging out at the small openair food places on the main and only street. The guys were excited about the tandem and we got a lot of thumbs up as we rode by. There were no women to be seen.  Some really nice employees at a roadside restaurant, sneaked us into the garden there after closing time and we pitched our tent on a little patch of grass overlooking the beach.

I really wish we could have stayed longer to explore and sample Moroccan food, but our time was running out on us so the next day we rode back to the port and caught the ferry to Algeciras, Spain, just across the Strait of Gibraltar.

Coming Out of Our Shell: The Turtles Discover Park ‘n Ride, Attend a 90th Birthday Party, and Learn to Sing in Italian

On one of our park n ride days we rode from sea level to the treeline of this mountain on nearly deserted winding roads in the Appenine National Park. The white spots in the mid-ground are villages.

Before arriving in Tuscany, we mostly followed  flat river  valleys due to concern about Michael’s limited exercise capacity but in the second half of the trip we’ve been delighted to find that we can climb. On a steel tandem loaded with camping gear its slow going up, but as long as the grade is mellow, we can manage. There is an abrupt cutoff at around 10% grade beyond which Michael gets really short of breath, in which case we just hop off and push.  If we take our panniers off, we can go higher and faster so we slowed down some more and enjoyed Tuscany, Liguria (north of Tuscany), and Andalucia by camping 2 days at the same place and going on day rides. Photos do no do justice to the panoramic views of mountains, ocean, olive trees and villages. What can I say? You gotta be there.

We did go to the famed  Cinque Terre but  found it crawling with tourists and populated by  residents who were by summer’s end justifiably sick of the invasion. Once again less traveled routes proved best, with equally beautiful vistas, villages, art, and architecture and peace and quiet in which to enjoy them. On the way up the coast to Cinque Terre, we stopped at a restaurant to get out of a downpour. Since we had the only sheltered table on the porch, we invited an older couple to share it and met Bertolo, there to celebrate his 90th birthday. Since he was posted in Spain while in the military, I was able to converse with him.  He is a volunteer fish warden and is still fit enough to patrol the streams looking for poachers. He is also in the process of writing a book about Ghandi on the computer.  He got very excited when we told him that our stepson Greg works for Fish and Wildlife in the US and we had a long discussion about fishing regulations and the health of fisheries in Italy. On our way out of Cinque Terre, we climbed another mountain, this time loaded down with all our gear, and found a simple memorial to a local cyclist at the summit, which included a spring for the filling of water bottles.

mountaintop memorial

stained glass window of church in Cinque Terre

Hiking between villages in Cinque Terre.

Plaque commemorating anarchist resistance fighter during WWII, found roadside on our way to Cinque Terre

Bertolo, 90 year old fish and game warden, displaying his credentials

Good restaurants in Italy were too expensive for our budget and we found the food in cheap eateries inferior to our own camp cooking so we made daily pilgrimages to those cathedrals of food otherwise known as supermarkets. These were inexpensive and fascinating although entire aisles devoted to different kinds of pasta or cheese often presented more choices than our cycling starved brains could handle. We spent hours looking at all the unfamiliar items and picking out things to try.

The Italians have convenience foods which are not highly processed but simply eliminate the first few steps of preparing something healthy from scratch. For example: whole cooked beets and meal sized containers of white or bechamel sauce. The box wine for under a dollar, was as good as 2 buck chuck and became a daily staple.  We found bread, the other staple, best purchased  warm from the oven at bakeries in the morning since it usually sold out by mid day.

All the European stores are meticulous about handling fruits and vegetables. If you go to a vegetable stand, you are not allowed to touch them at all. You can only point at what you want and a clerk picks it up and bags it for you. In the supermarkets produce must be picked up with plastic gloves and then sealed in a plastic bag to be weighed and taken to checkout. This is in response to a serious epidemic of E coli that began in Germany in May and June and resulted in several deaths. The Germans blamed it first on cucumbers imported from Spain and then on fenugreek from Egypt, but the bacteria was finally traced back to bean sprouts from an organic farm in …. Germany. It seemed so ecologically bad to put a single pepper or onion in a separate plastic bag, that I first tried to ignore the rules. After ignoring the rules and getting chastised at checkout, I came up with the idea of turning the plastic glove inside out while holding the vegetable and sealing it shut with the weigh sticker.

Between language difficulties, irritable natives, and our inability to hook up with any Warmshowers hosts, most of whom live in the major cities we were avoiding or were out bike touring themselves, we ended up feeling quite isolated.  On our last day in Italy, I was bemoaning our lack of connection and experience of contemporary Italian culture and once again my desires became manifest, proving the effectiveness of kvetching. That very evening we had the incredible experience of sitting in on a  local song circle. It turns out that our campground host was part of a popular folk group in the 8os. They used to tour but now just get together once a month and sing for fun. Without knowing the words, we were all carried along enough to join in on the refrains. Polyinstrumental with a seemingly endless repertoire,  lubricated by cameraderie and grappa, they were still playing and singing long after we went back to our tent to sleep.

Oh Lord, Stuck in Bologna Again!

It was a rainy day in mid September, getting late, and all the campgrounds were closed. Thankfully I had learned enough Italian by then to say “All the campgrounds are closed, can we put up our tent in your parking lot?” I learned the little bit of Italian I know by reading signs, which have the virtue of holding still, unlike the rapidfire speech of actual living people.  My resulting limited vocabulary (open, closed, garbage, forbidden, detour, sale, beware of dog) requires some creativity to deploy but it did, at least that time, get us in out of the rain.  Clearly it was time to move on,  so we decided to hop a train to Tuscany. Turns out it isn’t that simple.

Summer's Over

Planning our trip I read a lot of stuff online about problems taking tandems on European trains, and we considered taking single bikes instead, but since I can’t be trusted to hold onto credit cards and passports and Michael has no sense of direction, we decided it would be better to get lost together than separately. Other than not being allowed to ride the high speed ICE trains between major cities, we encountered few difficulties in northern Europe. We found we didn’t even need to unload the panniers or take the bike apart. Italy was another story.

The only trains we could take the bike on in Italy were the local trains that stop at every town. One train station had no humans selling tickets and all the ticket machines were broken.  To get from Ravenna to our objective, Lucca, required 3 train changes which are no small feat with a loaded tandem. The first train took us to Bologna, and there we got stuck. It took us 3 tries and 3 hours to finally catch a train out of town. We missed the first connection because we arrived a few minutes late and to get to the platform of the departing train we had to carry the tandem up and then down 2 flights of stairs. Even though the next train didn’t come for an hour, we were taking no chances and positioned ourselves strategically on the platform.  We missed it anyway because they announced a change of platform at the last minute and we had to carry the tandem up and down the stairs again.  By the this time it was getting dark, there was no campground or we prearranged place to stay at our destination, if we could ever manage to get there, and I was almost in tears.

We finally got onboard  the third train and only had to contend with a drunk guy who kept on ringing our bicycle bell. We made the next train change without incident and finally arrived in Lucca at 11 pm. Riding into this beautiful old walled town at night accompanied by strains of arias floating through the narrow streets, and ending up at a hostel in a 14th century convent made all the train grief worthwhile. We slept in sex segregated dorms, adding some monastic authenticity.  Hallelujah, we made it to Tuscany!

San Freddiano Hostel in Lucca

View of Lucca from the trail atop the city walls.

South, West, East and South: I think we’re riding in circles

This cathedral is wall to wall mosaic.

From Venice we went inland along the Po River. We spent a night “wild camping”  in a wooden lookout tower. We were discovered by locals who didn’t mind that we were camping as long as we didn’t go fishing. In Italy the fishing laws are enforced by local residents and they take their responsibility seriously.

Following a bike path that runs along the Po, we arrived in Ferrara, a city dating back to the 12th century. The town is enclosed by still intact walls built during the Renaissance. There are lots of buildings from the 1400′s that are still in use. We spent two days here, trying to repair or replace Michael’s leaky air mattress and our failing tent zippers without success. The second morning, I woke up to what sounded like whale breath but turned out to be hot air balloons from a festival launching in a nearby field and  flying over our campground.

Leaving Ferrara, we followed another branch of the Po southwest back to the Adriatic coast, and went south along the coast to Ravenna, a UN Heritage Site because of its Roman ruins and fabulous ancient mosaics. Even with all this high culture, we found the best entertainment value in Ravenna to be the automatic toilets which open, warn you when your time is up with a flashing red light, then flush and clean themselves all for 25 cents.

Michael emerging from the automatic johnWe spent the night in this tower overlooking the Po River

cathedral floor, they let us walk on this

 

mosaic closeup

Roots: In which an unfortunate fashion decision is taken under influence of grappa and we all scratch our heads over the economic crisis

Italian road sign that had us riding in circles

We’re in a campground at Punta Sabbioni on the island of Cavallino, across the bay from Venice but its not camping as we know it. Italians camp for different reasons than we do; mainly as an economical way to stay near tourist attractions; there is nothing of wilderness about it. Some campgrounds are temporary international villages and others are dominated by semipermanent trailer “summer homes” of people from nearby cities, complete with landscaping.  Most have restaurants, bars, and swimming pools, and many have evening entertainment which generally involves disco (still very much alive in Slovenia and Italy) and a guy with a microphone.  One endearing thing about Italian campers is that they walk around camp in their bathrobes or to the shower with just a towel wrapped around. They really make themselves right at home.

We transients generally share a grassy communal tent area without individual designated sites. This is good  for turtles who can crawl into camp at sunset without worrying that all the campsites will be taken but bad in that we cyclists don’t get a picnic table and have to cook and eat on the ground since,  unlike car campers, we can’t bring our own. This initially felt like a deprivation but this morning I’m inclined to think that picnic tables are absent for our own protection, since they can get you in all kinds of trouble.

Our campground, Maria de Venezia,  is one of the largest in Europe, with campsites numbered into the 8000s. Our group tent site, which we share with other cyclists and motorcyclists, does include a rare communal picnic table and the possibility of gathering a group around it to share provoked me last night into purchasing a bottle of grappa. Grappa is a drink created by frugal Italian peasants by distilling the fermented residue left after winemaking.  It is also the beverage of choice of the detective heroine’s downstairs neighbor in Sara Peretski novels and I was curious to try it.

Perhaps due to my appreciation of the literary connection, I over-imbibed and when my grappa garbled brain got the inspiration to dye my hair, my inability to read the Italian instructions on the bottle was no deterrent.  I awoke the next day with purple hair (rather than the intended auburn) that has a strange hydrangea-like propensity to change color if one runs out of shampoo and uses soap instead.

We did have a good discussion around the picnic table  with some folks from Germany, while we still had our faculties, about the EUs economic situation and learned what it was like to grow up in East Germany and experience the dismantling of the Berlin wall. Most Europeans we’ve asked about “the crisis”, as they call it,  tell us they don’t understand it and express doubt that their leaders do either.  There is general agreement that unregulated lending and speculation were the last straw, but we’ve also heard, from both northern and southern Europeans, that corruption, bloated bureaucracy, and a large untaxed black economy in southern Europe are chronic contributing factors and barriers to recovery.

One day we encountered a street sign stating that the road was closed due to a manifestazione so of course we had to go down it.  We found ourselves in the middle of a labor demonstration of  striking shipyard workers protesting temporary layoffs and a plan to permanently fire 2,000 workers.

We met  a number of well educated motivated people from Great Britain, Italy, and Spain who have not been able to find work for over a year.  We did not see the closed storefronts that we see in the US, probably because their social welfare systems continue to provide income and purchasing power,  although a decision was announced to cut unemployment benefits while we were there and we saw posters about protests against cuts and layoffs of public servants.  Aside from the few people we met with degrees in economics, the general view is “We know its bad, we see no way out, and we don’t want to think about it. “

Shipyard in Reva Trigoso

We´re in Spain

This is just a quick blogette (or I guess I should say blogito) to let everyone know we are OK. I haven´t been blogging because I dropped the Kindle one too many times and, while Amazon has been willing to send us a new one in theory, the actual logistics of finding an address where we are going to be at some future date and getting it and us there at the appointed time have been challenging. So much has happened that I don´t think I can go back and recreate it for you but I will try to at least give you some of the headlines I might have used to give you a flavor for our adventures: Unfortunate Fashion Decisions Made Under Influence of Grappa; Waking Up With Whale Breath ( hot air balloons in Ferrara!); Madonnas that Won´t Melt in your Mouth: The Incredible Ancient Mosaics of Ravenna); How Many Tandemists Does It Take to Change Location? How We Missed 3 Trains and Ended Up Sleeping in a Convent; more to follow.