And I love dirty Italy
But what I dont love is what you see on the pictures and that is a lot of fog, almost looks like polution (and maybe it is partially especially when its combined with the fog)
There was non of that in France on the other side.
Nevertheless I love being in Italy (for all the reasons) and I chose this mountain pass because I have never been here before.
The road would then take me first to Torino then Milan, where my plan is to take a train to Gorizia and skip this norther part of Italy.
But only because I have cycled this before (some parts even more than once) and I am close to home so I just want to get home now.
Not to say that train journey are easy with a bicycle, in fact its quite the opposite.
I have already learned that this part from Milan to Gorizia requires you to take 3 trains (there is no direct route when you have full bicyle).
I wont even mention what mess it to go from one train to another with a heavy loaded bike and often with minutes to spare trying to find your next train in busy train stations.
The only good thing about this is that it all costs 38 eur, so at least its cheap.
Back to Italy.
I immediatelly started to enjoy this dirty Italian arhitecture (as I call it). Even when houses look like ruins, there is some beauty in them.
I can tell you right away, when houses look like ruins in my country, there is nothing beautiful about that. They just look like ruins.
This belong to my funny signs collection
More fog
Until Milan, I still had to sleep one more night outside and I was struggling to find a host for several days already.
Started looking for a host in France around town of Chambery and onwards as I was climbing over the mountian pass into Italy.
However I had not luck and I was running out of electricity on all my powerbanks.
Today I was supposed to be in Torino, which is a big city.
There were plenty of hosts on the map, however response rate was almost not existent.
So I ended up in the middle of the city in the evening.
Its not so much a problem for wild camping (although it is sometimes) because after years of experience I can pretty much camp anywhere. I have made my peace.
I saw this was going to happen and there is not much you can do about it.
Looking at the map it didnt show any suitable area because everything is heavily populated.
Personaly I hate sometimes when this happens because although wild camping is possible almost anywhere (if you want it), you may loose a good night sleep if you end up in the city centre trying to camp.
So that was exactly was happened :D
I ended up in some public park (in a very busy town center) and after dinner and all that even managed to find a place to put a tent.
I would even have a good night sleep if there was not for some concert happenning not very far off and this was quite loud and lasted well into the night.
Next morning the plan was to go straight to Milan which was still far off (around 160km) and in normal circustances this would be managable, but recently I had some saddle sores which prevented me pedaling too much in a day (I couldnt do much more than 100 realistically).
Luckily in all this I managed to find a host in the country side in small town of Lomello (which was about 50km outside of Milano).
This was my first Italian host and her name was Ausilia and she was a very keen cyclist with many past race experiences (like Brevet and similar).
However she was very busy that day so we only met briefly when I arrived, later she had to attend a town meeting.
Still I had some conversation with her and her friend on their farm property.
I wish it was different because it would be very interesting to listen stories about her racing background.
However I was happy because I managed to do all my necessities (laundry, charging devices..) so I could continue the last stretch of my journey.
Forgot to mention that exiting Torino today was one of the worst cycling experinces in traffic I had ever had probably.
It was partly my fault because I switched from "bike touring" to "road ride" in Komoot that morning (because I wanted to get to my host today as fast as possible) so I am sure Komoot took some blaim (basically "road ride" takes faster, straight and often more busier roads).
I am used to Italian drivers being quite zipping around but I find them still careful of cyclists (probably becuase cycling is a national sport in Italy) and I remember passing through Milan (which is a huge city) several times in the last few years and although trafic was very alive, I still felt safe being inbetween the cars in strict city centre.
However exiting Torino today seemed like all this was amplified by 10.
Roads were in terrible condition (thats the time when I wish I have 50mm tires instead of skinnies I like to use), bumps and potholes everywhere and it seemed like there was no cycle path anywhere where the Komoot took me so pretty much all the time I was staying with the cars on the road.
I still had a smile on my face all the time but (oh boy) if felt like I was going to die that morning many times, or get siriuously hurt :)
It all reminded me of those places like heavily populated streets of India with traffic scenes where everything is completely out of control.
River crossing somewhere on the outskirts of Milan
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