Back home in freezing Melbourne..reflections and musings

Home again and for the first time I ended up in a seat from Singapore to Melb next to someone who overflowed her seat onto mine...not happy Jan.    So back home to winter and I'm wearing as much as I did in the Dolomiti when it was snowing!  so ..tell me...HOW can I show off MY sun tan in this weather?

..doesn't look like any of these

More like this one!

• Something I forgot to add in "things I learned" ......we discovered that the very best place for coffee in any village or town was always where the old men were sitting, solving the problems of the world.  100% guaranteed
• Phil and Paul isms did feature in my mind.....not much "dancing on the pedals" but lots of "turning myself inside out" and Jens' "Shuttup legs" got quite an airing in the last few days 
• the big question...would I do it again?..yes definitely but if I did I would take a break from Rome to Venice..which is where we crossed a part of Italy that is very flat, great for crops and very very like where I lived the first 18 years of my life, the fens of Lincolnshire with ditches, canals, raised roads, dykes , locks etc etc and so it held no interest for me.  Others liked the area,(no hills) but really I felt my physical condition went downhill around this time with overwhelming fatigue becoming a major feature.  So a week away from the bike would have, in retrospect, been a wise move.
• Of my electronic woes...the phone just needed a charge from the mains and the Garmin has finally decided to download the last 14 rides.  I guess for both of them there just wasn't enough oomph in the computer to nudge them into life, but , sniff, gulp, the iPod remains dead.

So..the last day...Latsch to Como..along a valley, mostly on a meandering bike path which occasionally took us into the narrow cobbled streets of very small villages...just like in the south. For a while we kept passing  signs with the word pericoloso (danger) on them, but cheerfully ignored them until we came upon quite a steep drop off...which we negotiated very well, although the back markers of the bigger group had a few problems...it felt like mountain biking all over again.

Our small group of 4 eventually decided to stop for coffee and discovered the rest of the group already there..total coincidence.....the poor women doing the coffees freaked out big time....far too many people all at once for her to cope..ran out of cups and brain.

and then it was a ride en masse to our last lunch:

after which we rode to Lake Como and waited for a ferry

and this is where we came from...was it still snowing up in those clouds?

the crew posing for last pix at Como

the last meal together in Como..just standard sized pizzas!!!

Ciao!