Genova to Grasse... The Hard Way
The Actual Brewery
So, to Genova! Home of that other crazy sod, Christoforo Colombo (or was he the seedy detective? Whatever...), and after a very long drag through the city we finally made it to the sea! Proper docks and cranes, and a very blue Mediterranean. By this time, Italy was feeling ok for me - relaxing, going with the swing, not stressing about anything - remember, it's not personal! Not sure Jim felt the same though.We finally hit the SS1 to cruise down the coast in style - wonderful riding, there was no traffic! Our suspicions should have been aroused - the first tunnel was closed for repairs, we'd seen the sign 2 miles back but it only seemed to be telling us that that was going to happen, not that it had! It was a handy drag strip for timetrialling cyclists though, we saw a couple several times, because we turned around and parked up in a bus station to work out what to do.
The Sea!! The Parked Bikes!
Up in the sky, where we'd like to be...
On the subject of cyclists, it's just like being a football fan - you wear your favourite team/rider's strip, from whatever era you like best or matches your eye colour (I made that up), and get out with your mates to celebrate it. In fact, it's better than being a football fan, because you're out on your bike and not on the couch. Now I get it, I shall definitely have to get some team strip to annoy the British cyclists, who are far too up their bottoms to do anything so interesting or colourful. Hurray!
The GPS seemed to have its knickers in a twist - no matter what we did, it wanted to go up the blocked SS1. We decided to bang off a few miles on the pay autostrada, since there didn't seem to be another way that didn't involve heading massively inland and back the way we came. Turned on motorways, tolls... didn't matter. So we headed back into Genova, looking for the autostrada sign, and it was easily found. However, the actual access wasn't easy, hairpin, narrow road, and only in Italy would you take a toll ticket at a booth, then wiggle onto the Nice (not Genova) lane, round a 180 degree turn, and be faced with a toll booth after 200 yards!! The man was nice, I paid for both of us, and we were off on the autostrada.
The Ligurian/Provencal motorway is a great example of "diretissima" (term for an Italian approach to mountaineering based on the use of a rock drill and bolts - hammer your way up the face, bolting in as you go). Basically, the road selects an optimum cost, balancing tunnels and bridges, to blast a way across the valleys and mountains leading down to the coast. An amazing piece of engineering, thank goodness someone invented taxes to pay for it all. Look to the left - incredible, magical terracotta roofed towns, clustered around blue bays; look to the right - green clefts covered in forest, with white houses dotted into the mountainsides. Magic. At least, when you aren't in a tunnel!
Lunch stop cafe and bar
Pizza, coffee, water - marv
The original plan had been to turn off SS1 onto a detour through some small roads, just to keep it interesting. We still did this, and thank goodness we did. We'd written down the name of an intermediate village that would get us onto the right road, and after a lunch stop, headed for it, having forgotten that's what it was meant to do. However, this turned into a major exploration of the Ligurian hills, perfect empty, windy roads, beautiful woods, olive trees, sleepy villages, forgotten stone buildings, an entire dream-like universe. We stopped just to savour the silence and view - we've said "magic" too often already, but we agree that this was one of the best rides ever. It's hard to understand how the villages function - the only way to get to them is via these tiny, bendy roads with precipitous verges, so everything has to go up there in a lorry, right? Anyway, we headed onto what we thought would be the last of the roads, and turned out to be very lucky - it was actually marked "do not enter" as we left it (!), having passed various fallen rocks and trees, and several groups of workmen along it working clear it. Wow, a dodged bullet! Let us moan no more...
Ligurian Shangri La
Emerging from the green maze, the choice was now to join the SS1 again, and cruise through Monaco, Nice and Cannes, en route to Grasse (apparently the capital of French perfume production, according to the Swiss couple we chatted with this morning), or to pop onto the autostrada/autoroute and pay our way for an easy ride. Tired after so much bend-swinging, and not fancying negotiating rush hour on the Cote D'Azur, we opted for the latter...
- The Rock - driving through endless traffic lights and roundabouts, buzzed by motos, albeit with pretty sea views.
- The Hard Place - struggling with tollbooths and mad bastards driving a yard apart, at a traffic density that would shame the M25!
We chose the latter, not realising it was the latter. We even lost one another after a particularly hard tollbooth episode (John had to call the operator in two separate booths when no payment alternative was offered!), where Jim turned out to be ahead of John but thought he was behind, and John had no idea... Amazingly, John ended up in the booth beside Jim's at the same time, after 20 miles of driving alone, so we were able to manage the rest of the route to the hotel together. Hurray!!
Jim excavating his onion soup...
night night bikes
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