The ferry docked in Bari on a sunny Tuesday morning, the 25^th of August, 2015. The ride to the gate in the middle of the port area had become familiar. Soon we were riding straight across town to the train station. Like many Italian cities, Bari has turned two of its main boulevards into pedestrian zones, with upscale shops, benches and fountains. In other cities, merchants who blindly oppose change cannot accept the hard data that increasing pedestrian and bicycle traffic, and eliminating parking in front of their stores and restaurants, dramatically increases traffic into their establishments. Continue reading →

Tuesday, 18 August 2015. Finding our way back to the main road to leave Budva did not pose a problem, but a hot sun awaited us when we cleared the buildings. The highway hugged the rocky coast like a glove, giving us many switchbacks to climb as we snaked our way to Bar, the next major town. We planned to reach Ulcinj, an Albanian town inside Montenegro, 73 km from Budva. Continue reading →

Saturday, 15 August. As we cranked our way up the cardiac hill leading from Cavtat to Highway 8, I saw the sun shining like a halo around the 1400-m peaks beyond the Dubrovnik Airport. We rode a ridge road on the western edge of a broad plateau at about 200 meters. No wonder that the airport occupied the plateau: it had to be the only piece of flat real estate in the whole country big enough for an airport. As it is, someone had chopped off a small hilltop to complete the site work. Continue reading →

Thursday, 13 August (53.3 km). We took an early ferry from Korčula to Orebic. As we debarked, a carload of Polish tourists dickered with the crew of a fishing vessel trying to offload their catch into a waiting truck. I remember buying fish that fresh when we lived in Gaeta.  Continue reading →

Tuesday, 4 August, 2015. (53.2 km) In the morning, we rode down to the ferry port and confirmed what we learned in Dubrovnik. The former Yugoslav national ferry line, now called Jadrolinja, simply will not take bicycles on its high-speed ferries. Continue reading →

Friday, 31 July. The granite mountains towered over Dubrovnik as the ferry entered the bay. I tried to pick out the hotel where I stayed when the USS Springfield called in 1972, the first American warship to visit Yugoslavia in many years. New highways snaked through the hills, and new suburbs spread north and south of the city, making it hard to figure out where things used to be. Continue reading →

Monday, 27 July. After some wandering across the promontory south of Taranto, we found the coast road for Porto Cesareo (pronounced Porto Cesáreo locally). The cloudless blue skies continued, but a cool steady breeze off the Ionian softened the heat as we rolled past beaches and resorts. Continue reading →

Sunday, 19 July. To get our tour back on track, we needed to move faster. Sitting in Trapani on the extreme western end of Sicily, we saw that the only way to take a train to the east coast involved going back to Palermo and skipping the three-star Greek temples on the south coast. So we took the train as far south as it would go: to Castelvetrano. From there, we made our way through town and down a well-paved provincial road to the ancient Greek city of Seliunte on the coast. Continue reading →

On Tuesday (14 July), we rode to Palermo. At first, we enjoyed the Madonie Mountains to the south. Then the road became rather uninteresting, as one industrial suburb followed another. We probably should have jumped on a train, but by the time we realized that, we had passed the last station before the capital. Nevertheless, we were both glad to ride into this amazing city. I had always wanted to visit Palermo, and Cheryl was looking forward to showing me some of its beautiful sights. Continue reading →