Up at the crack of dawn to brush the rocky dust off our sleeping bag. An army of tents and caravans has assembled itself on the beachside roads; this turns out to be a clothing market, much to our dismay - we can't carry additional clothing, much less eat it. Priorities change utterly during long bike trips. Food and sleep are paramount, while shirts may be worn until they hang off your neck from a single thread...
We ride up the beach, grabbing a quick bite from a small bakery and food shop staffed by a friendly-looking generic Italian man. Purchasing food has become a minor ordeal now with the language barrier. We have definitively entered that portion of our trip where we can no longer communicate freely - granted, it was that way in the various alternate-language regions of Spain, but Castellano was at least reluctantly accepted as the common tongue - and must instead resort to a strange combination of gestures and Franspañolglish to get our point across. Pan! Pain! Bread! That thing up there on the wall! Point! Grunt! It's like being catapulted into some broad pastiche of preliterate Stone Age stereotypes.
But back to the trip. We ride up a bit further, finding a fountain back on the main route towards Genova - and quickly discover that we left our knife behind...and so we ride back to the beach, fighting the steadily thickening pedestrian traffic around the market (too much stuff, not enough things!) to park our bikes and comb the stones for any hint of glistening metal...but we come up empty-handed. We decide to at least take a different route out from our campsite this time; nothing enhances that dejected failure feeling quite like having to take the same route twice...
...and this time we do something right, for we happen upon the food market. That's more like it! The aisles are full of butchers and fruit stands and - further proof that we have truly entered Italia - pasta vendors, their bins brimming with freshly-made pasta in every colour and with every filling imaginable. We eat, stop for caffé, mull over the morning's setbacks; it is now 1000, and the sun has long since climbed over the mountains. Time to head out, finally - we are soon on the road, booking it for Genova to make up for the lost morning hours. Road signs are less informative, and it takes us a while to find one that marks the distance to Genova (142 km, just a bit too far to make it with a late start along these mountainous coastal roads.)
A bike path! Of all places - here, along the coast, where there is a considerable shortage of land and everything must be built on terraces hacked out of the mountain or above tunnels or in labyrinths of overpasses and stairs and hillside foundations - here, we find a beautiful flat well-paved bike path right next to the coast. Attention, France: this is how you pave a road. More evidence that, while whatever ancestors the French had were scratching their beards and beating each other over the head with sheep, the Romans were busy expropriating labour from anywhere they could conquer to build roads along some impressively steep coastline (and, as we found before, far far far into the Iberian peninsula.)
We follow that for some 20 km until it dead-ends in a construction fence - apparently there are some parts of the coastline that are too space-squeezed even for a bike path...but it was nice while it lasted. We fumble around, hoping to bypass the fence somehow and join the path again - but there is no more path, and so we finally cave in and take the road.
A great shadow has lifted over our trip, we note; we are at last roughly as silly as we were before - some time long before, way in the North, way up in the lands where the cycling was less strenuous and hospitality was more frequent, where we camped in campgrounds rather than bunkering down just off the road shoulder - no longer labouring in the oppressive heat (that our good friend HST even had difficulty explaining himself in, hmmm.) We sing silly songs and crack silly jokes and make up silly wordplay puns as we ride along. We inhale deep lungfuls of salty sea air, smiling those big wide stupid grins that are reserved for the truly happy. We talk about anything and everything - how excited we are for future travels, both during and after this trip; our plans to wreak havoc in San Francisco; even the Improv Everywhere-style musical we could stitch together from the songs we largely improvise as we ride along...
...and, towards the end of the day, we come across a rocky outcropping along the coast between two smallish towns. It has beach access and enough flat space to pitch a tent - perfect! We pull over, pop our gear off, hoist the bikes over the guardrail, lock them firmly, and take a quick swim. As we dry off, two haggard-looking travellers jump the guardrail, their backs weighed down with packs that carry bedrolls and sleeping bags (but, as we learn, no tent...) They are German, from the southern regions near the Swiss border; they are younger than ourselves (by five years! Most travellers we meet are slightly older); they hitchhiked their way down through Milano and Genova, taking a bus out here to find a spot by the seaside...
...and, as the night wears on and our meal is nearly ready, they pull out a guitar and regale us with music before we retire separately, they to their beachside sleeping bags and we to our tent up by the bikes (which, sadly, we must guard with our lives...) Perhaps we will greet the morning with another quick swim - but for now, there is sleep...