Ride Day 10: Terranuova to Montelpuciano

Wine.  That's our theme in this "phase 2" of our trip.  So misspellings, grammatical nonsense and incoherence in structure in this blog will be the fallout.  Adapt. 



In the middle ages, say around the 5^th century, it probably made sense to build your village at the top of some hill with ungodly steep slopes up to the top.  Closer to God, and far better to fight off the teeming hordes, the non-Christians, the east siders from Bend.  Whomever.  But now days those advantages seem a bit dated and they aren’t so PC as they once were.  So maybe we should thing about relocating villages like Montepulciano into the nearby valleys.  There’s plenty of room, no precipitous ledges, and no steep freaking roads required.  After today’s ride that is what I am voting for!

Our night in Loro was, in a word, peaceful.  After the hectic business of Florence it was great to have a night with no more sound than a cricket chirping.  We had a nice breakfast and then headed down the road – destination Montepulciano.  The first 15 km were super busy with as we transected some kind of commercial area – everyone trying to get to work, I guess.  But we had no real problems.

Riding out of Loro -- some clouds but very warm

Every hill-top has a village

And lots of wildflowers

On our first climb

The village of Lucignano

There were three climbs on today’s route.  The first was on tiny, narrow roads little wider than I can stretch my arms apart.  In 20 km we saw one car and the gradients were 6 – 8 % and we found that we could comfortably spin up the road.  Oh, not fast, but comfortable.  A bunch of Italian cyclists passed us but were super encouraging and flat out curious about where in the world we came from. We have yet to see another tandem in Italy.

The drop down the other side was even better – narrow road with only one car in 15 km.

The next hill was relatively short, maybe 200 m of climbing, but it was steep and hurt a bit.  A cool little village at the top (Lucignano) convinced us to stop for gelato and to stroll around the town.

Good gelato but we should have gone for bigger caloric intake!

The drop down was fast but on well pave road. 

Then we hit the wall – the road that led up to the mountain top village of Montepulciano.  Oh my.  The hill was 11 km long – about 7 miles.  But it was no less than 14%.  My GPS registered 19% at one point and then I turned it off.  Why would I look at it?  Depressing.  We were laboring to turn the pedals over but Lorie pushed us on and we made it to the tiny hill top village.  I swear that we almost tipped over a couple of times!  And we were so rubber-legged that we could hardly stand properly.  I have not “bonked” in many years but I was close to it today.  I tried to eat a lot on the road, but clearly it was not enough.  Our GPSs said that our caloric burn on the day was 4,700 calories.  It is hard to replace those calories by eating energy bars and gels.  No photos along the way.

So in a village that is maybe the size of Metolius Meadows what does one do?  Get lost of course!  We have 2 GPS units, one computer, and two cell phones and we had routes programmed into all of them.  They all disagreed on where our hotel was located and told us to go up steep stairs, through nice people’s houses (which we declined to do), and ultimately gave us no help whatsoever.

Finally, we heard a British couple arguing over their paper map.  We jumped into the conversation and asked “where the heck are we.”  They were expert navigators and showed us just where we’d gone wrong and where we needed to go.  Thanks Brits!

Montepulciano, Piazza Grande

Montepulciano, Piazza Grande

Montepulciano, Piazza Grande

Montepulciano.  Sustenance.  

 

The view

The other way

Toward the archeological wine site

History and wine.  What else is necessary?

Cisterns from 2nd century BC

 After a quick shower we wandered a bit and found a cool archeological museum thing that has glass floors over cisterns from the 2^nd century BC.  That’s a long time ago.  And above the glass floors are wine dispensers from the 21^st century.  When you walk in they give you a card with a chip in it and 100 € credit.  You then stick the card in a slot, pick the wine you want, put your glass under the spigot and enjoy the local Nobili Montepulciano wine.  The enjoy part is easy – the wine is a big Italian red but is super good.  It was a bit too easy to buy the wine, and we ended up with a couple of glasses each for a total of 12 €.  Not bad.

Free wine?

It just pours out...

The hotel made a reservation for us at an osteria – the cheapest of the Italian restaurants for later this evening.  I’ll report back.