The original plan was to go on a 9 day long kayaking trip through the Adriatic archipelago. But then the weather and wind intervened. At first it looked like the wind will be wrong for kayaking and also for everything else. Then the west coast of Italy popped up and promised 6 straight days of surfing in the middle of summer. It was to good to be true. If you are not sure about the forecast, bring your mountain bike :). So we packed out mountain bikes together with our surfboards and hit the road. Due to the lack of peeing pitstops I was able to “only surfer knows the feeling” into my boardshorts on the evening of the first day of the trip. 45 minutes session after 6h of driving felt good, even though the waves were really messy. You can’t really complain when you have a Tuscany sunset above your head. I surfed until it was completely dark.
Next day was supposed to be the bomb. Perfect size and no wind. The size was there, but the wind played tricks on us the whole day. So on the Tuscany perfection scale it was somewhere around hm…hard to day, these spots can get sooo perfect. OK, maybe 6/10. Three surf session later we were dead tired. Forecast turned around a bit and Thursday morning was supposed to be the last time there would be decent swell. Swell would then drop off during the day into the unsurfable range. So alarm clock was set for early Thursday morning. And it was really good. The forecast low balled the wave size and it was finally really glassy. And with Italy vacation time, small forecast and being workday we were alone at the main peak. This never happens when there are waves. Set waves were really smackable:). We surfed till the waves disappeared and because the small swell rise on Friday didn’t look that promising we decided it was mountain biking time. We packed our van and headed for the hills.
Damn. Headed for the hills sounds like a figure of speech but this time it was very literal. Google navigation gets a bit crazy looking for the “best” route to your destination which was in our case mountain bike park in the Apenines. And you can not explain to the app that you are not driving a 4×4 Fiat Panda but an almost 6m long van. So heading for the hills meant driving our almost 6m van on a really narrow and steep road into the mountains. The road was constantly going up up and up with incline reaching 18%. First and second gear all the way from the bottom to the top. What made things even worse was a constant surge of oncoming traffic with no room on the road for two vehicles to meet. Obviously the top of the road was a popular tourist point. So the drive was quite an adrenaline rush.
Next day we did some mountain biking in a Abetone gravity bike park that describes itself as “not easy”. If you are mtb first timer check this guide instead of this park :D. People at the park are super nice and gladly explained all the trails:
“This one is WC DH trail, these are not easy as well, maybe take this one – no.6 a couple of times at first.”
“Is it easy?”
“Errr…not easy, easier. I don’t know your level.”
Haha. What followed was us missing all the turns and directions given by the friendly staff and ended up riding the DH track from top to bottom. It was actually really fun trail with (for me) just one really tricky technical section over the rocks where I had to get off the bike.
And not to keep things monotonous and boring we ended the trip with driving home 2 days early picking up our kayaks and paddling to Goli otok.
Tuscany, 13.-15.8.2019