A journey of 1000 miles starts with a.... trip to Gatwick Airport

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We are off on Saturday. We leave Gatwick at 08:00 and hopefully Easyjet will get us and our bike boxes to Venice by lunchtime. We plan to spend a pleasant afternoon in the strictly utilitarian Hotel Antony attempting to reassemble our bikes. Doubtless they’ll be one essential component left over and none of us will be quite sure where it should go. The next challenge will be to organise TNT to collect our bike boxes and have them sent to our final destination in Sicily, not a task to be undertaken lightly as on our last trip, only one of the four boxes actually turned up at our destination which meant amongst other things, having to endure Graham’s schoolboy shorts for another couple of days. So on Sunday morning we should be packed and heading south by about 05:00.

Our planned route will see us covering 980 miles from Venice to Mount Etna in Sicily over eight days. Day 1 from Venice to Montegridolfo is the longest at 156 miles but thankfully the first 120 miles along the coast are pretty flat. On day 2 and 3 we go up into the Appennines, 137 and 146 miles respectively with some 13,500 feet of climbing over both days. Day 4 will be 129 miles and we’ll come out of the mountains north of Naples meeting the coast at Salerno; the site of the main allied landings in Italy in 1943 during which I believe, my uncle lost an eye. We then stick to the coast for the rest of the day. Day 5 is shorter at 90 miles but we have to climb 10,000 feet back up into the hills around the Pollino National Park. Day 6 at 134 miles takes us through Cosenza and Lamezia Terme to Tropea, nearly at the ‘toe’ of Italy. Day 7 will see us taking the ferry to Sicily and then on down to Tamoina at 110 miles. On the final day we will attempt an ascent of Etna. Well that’s the plan anyway.

Chris has spent hours designing the route with the aid of Bikeroutetoaster and Google Earth and thanks to him, we have what looks like a splendidly scenic ride in store keeping away from most of the main roads. Having a well crafted route is one thing, navigating it is quite another. To complement our usual paper map and reading glasses approach, we are going to use the OutDoors app for iPhones, This seems to be one of the few apps that has detailed maps of Italy you can preload on your phone, import a .gpx file containing the route and follow it using GPS.

Clearly, we’ve had to ensure our bikes are ready. The succession of lost brake pads and snapped cables during recent rides has to be avoided if at all possible when we’re in Italy which means that Graham’s Kuota Kebel, Sam’s Ridley Orion, Chris’ Basso Laguna and Harley’s Giant FCR have all had a major service.

Now there’s this remarkable bloke called Simon Hartwell who is a bit of a cycling fanatic as can be seen from this image of the great man standing astride the Col de Bonnette, the highest French Alpine pass on the Tour de France. In his workshop which reminds one of an operating theatre at a top London teaching hospital, Simon operates on bicycles with greater care and attention to detail than any brain surgeon. What he doesn’t know about unsticking a Kuota seat post, making a wheel spin like a turbine blade or registering Campagnolo gears really isn’t worth knowing. This week, having undergone a multiplicity of operations, Simon returned our machines to us gleaming, tuned to perfection and ready for the off – thank you.

If you’re thinking about going on this sort of journey, its more than planning routes and booking hotels, the list of arrangements is never-ending. For our trip it seems to have fallen to Harley to sort out the bulk of these logistics, whether it’s getting the right bike boxes and arranging for their shipment from one end of Italy to the other, designing the right nutrition packs and having them sent to each hotel ready for the following day’s ride, or mapping out who takes what when carrying capacity is very limited, Harley has worked through a seemingly endless checklist to ensure we are all set.

And we probably are..

Keep you posted!