Traveling Applejax

How many hours were Mike and Jackie in Italy before being interrogated by the police? Read on to find out!

Things haven’t exactly calmed down since we got to Italy, but we’re on vacation now.

When we got to Venice on Friday, we got right to work putting our bikes together outside of the airport. It was a hot sunny day, and it took quite a while for us to get everything sorted out. After that, our huge dilemma was how to transport our giant bike box 15 miles to our AirBnB destination for the night. After trying several ridiculous designs, Mike attached it on his back rack so it stuck out about 3-4 feet on either side of his bike. Needless to say, we looked a little crazy biking down the road. Luckily, most of our route was pretty rural.

Of course, when we did try to go through a small town, the polizia stopped us. They said we just couldn’t bike down the road with such a large box. “You are as wide as a car, but you are not a car,” was the protest. We waited to see what they would suggest instead. Finally, they told us that if we took a different route around their town we wouldn’t be their problem anymore. (By the way, this was approximately 5 hours after arrival.)

It took us about 2.5 hours to bike that 15 miles. I was tired and hungry and glad to finally make it to our AirBnB. We slept like rocks that night.

Then, we got up nice and early to walk to the Treviso train station so we could get to Firenze to meet Deb, Dan, Elliot, and Noe. Our day-and-a-half visit there was a whirlwind of pizza, pasta, gelato, and exploration. We walked a lot, chased after the kids a lot, ate a lot, and climbed a lot of steps to get to the top of the Duomo for a fabulous view of the beautiful city.

The side trip was too quick, but I’m anxious to start biking soon. Thanks, Deb and Dan, for hosting us in Firenze!