After a wonderful few days at the coast with my very dear friend Lorna I made it safely to Italy.  I love you Lorna!!

The flight from Van to TO was almost full, but the flight on to Rome was at most half full.  As soon as they announced that boarding was complete there was a mass scurrying of passengers to the empty seats – some got a full row to themselves.

I watched four or five movies as well as an interesting documentary on Leonardo da Vinci – kind of appropriate since we were landing at the airport named after him.

Colin was there to pick me up and I got to meet his new rescue dog Henry – a little sweetie.

The next few days were spent wondering if the races I came over early for were going to go ahead – right up until Wednesday evening we thought it might be ok, but then the bad news came.  Not only Strade Bianche was postponed, but also Tirreno-Adriatico and the Giro di Sicilia – so disappointed!

We did have a nice day trip to Trevi for lunch one day, and have been regular patrons of the bar – Antonio makes a decent cappuccino and fusses over the dogs.  We met a very nice british couple at the bar – they own a house in the village and are staying for an entire year. They know the area well and told us where an excellent butcher is in the next village – we picked up some excellent lamb chops for dinner the next day.  We couldn’t see any chops in the display case but when the butcher understood what we wanted he went to a side room and brought out a leg of lamb then cut two nice thick pieces for us.

The weather has been mixed – pouring rain a couple of times, then other days beautiful sunshine, although not yet really hot.  We went on a nice long walk yesterday and I tried out the new Nikon D7200 camera that Colin very kindly got for me. I still love my Canon, but can see that having more than one camera has its advantages, especially at a race (if there were any down here!).

We’re not in a ‘high risk’ area for the coronavirus as it’s mostly up north right now and our plan is to go south to Sicily in a couple of weeks.  So far there doesn’t seem to be any panic around here – stores are still fully stocked and folks seem to be going about their normal business. Hopefully it stays this way.

We did get some more disappointing news, however – there’s an annual festival here, the ‘Festa di San Guiseppe’ and they fly large balloons from the village square, including ones at night with candles in them.  It looked very interesting and we were excited that we would be here for it, but it also has now been cancelled out of an abundance of caution over the dreaded coronavirus – darn!

We’re still able to get some race watching in, albeit on tv – Paris-Nice is going ahead so all is not lost.

• Cycling
• Italy
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