Riding through Slovenia, Liz said to me on a particularly beautiful day, “This place just makes me smile!”.  Her words have echoed in my mind many times since.  We had a lovely climb our last day in Slovenia with a spectacular descent afterwards:  views down into the valley below, tailwinds pushing us ever faster–at least until the crosswind moved my bike suddenly a couple of feet to the side and I decided I should slow it down.  But we have had many reasons to smile as of late.

Before I go on, I would like to share that I have been trying up upload my Garmin cycling computer rides onto Strava.com, a site that maps the ride and shows the route, elevation gain, speed, etc.  You can see the rides by going to strava.com and looking for barbsmit@hotmail.com.  Warning…all of the barb smiths of the world crop as well so you have to scan through for my site.  Here is a screen shot of the ride to which I refer:

Anyway, I will try to include some of the maps in the blog but for the biking geeks among you, feel welcome to look on Strava.  Sometimes I even manage to add some info about the ride but I haven’t had time to do that very often.

You can see on the map above that we ended up very close to the Italian border (black line)that night and so crossed over early the next day.

The next day, we rode in a long convoy (ie all in a big long line together) to the outskirts of Venice due to heavy traffic and the need to catch a water taxi to Lido, an island near Venice (also an island, of course) where we are currently having 2 rest days.

Once we arrived at the dock, we had to wait for the boat that hauled our bikes to the island and the water taxis to take the riders.  We were delayed a bit while a water ambulance arrived to take a patient to the hospital.  Since Venice is on an island, everything happens by boat.

Venice is quite amazing and also amazingly crowded at this time of year (high season).  Fortunately Jim and I hired a guide this morning who took us around to the back streets of the city so we were able to see the beautiful, quiet side of life in Venice.  Had we not done that I would have been sorely disappointed at how noisy and crowded it was.  She told us that the population of the city has been dwindling due to the take over of the tourists and high cost of living (from about 150,000 in the 1960s to about 50,000 residents today—but 30 million tourists per year!!!).  It is an amazing place, however, and we were able to learn about how it was built on an artificial island made from pounding wooden posts into the silt by hand many centuries ago.  It was a wealthy, independent nation-state for over 10 centuries.  Amazing.

Lido, the island adjacent to Venice where we are staying is much quieter with fewer tourists.  Jim and I found a beautiful restaurant, Trattoria Andri, to eat at last night.  Al fresco dining under a vine-covered trellis, water served in a beautiful Murano glass pitcher, amazing pasta and seafood.  As Liz said, this place makes me smile.

We also had a lovely goodbye dinner on the waterfront for Liz and Trond who have to head back to work and so are leaving the ride.  We will miss them.

Tomorrow it is off riding once again, heading across northern Italy to Genoa. The weather promises to be hot and I hear that we have some climbing ahead.  Full of Italian pasta, seafood and gelato, I am sure we are up to the task.

Ciao Bella!