Italy Day 4

Our first day of biking! We were so excited to start our day! We left our campground around 10:00am. We knew that today would be our longest bike day, but we had no idea what was in store for us!

First, we biked to the other side of Lido (10km) and jumped on a ferry.

We biked another 10km on Pellestrina. Skyler decided that he wanted to go for a swim in the Adriatic Sea before we got on our second ferry.

We arrived in Chioggia three hours later, but had barely covered any distance on our bikes. Chioggia was a cute little town, but we had no time to explore. We were eager to put some miles (kilometers) on our bikes.


Skyler planned our trip specifically for May since the weather would be perfect for bike riding--not too hot and not too cold. It should have been a high of 80 and low of 50 at night. Notice that I said "should have been." Well, Italy had a heat wave, which we heard was equivalent to August. It ended up being about 90-100 degrees during the day. Lucky us!

I still can't believe that we navigated around a foreign country using a large fold-out map! We are both map experts now.

This turned out to be one of our favorite days of riding. We rode along the Po River for most of the ride. There were lots of old farmhouses, churches, and beautiful landscapes.


The day was starting to wind down yet our map still showed quite a distance left to go. I knew the map couldn't lie, but why was it taking so long? Well, the company that we rented bikes from gave us incorrect information about the distance to our first city, Ferrara. Instead of 89 km, we ended up riding almost 150km (that's almost 100 miles folks)!


We stumbled into Ferrara at 9:00pm. We had been on our bikes for almost 11 hours! I almost cried when I saw the campground. I was so happy to get off of my bike. We found the closest restaurant and bought a ton of food. We ended our meals with the largest serving of gelato I had ever seen. We deserved it for sure!


I must clarify that the reason that it took so long was that 1) we were in a foreign country so we were unfamiliar with the area, 2) we had to keep stopping to look at the map because of all of the different roads we had to use, 3) we stopped for breakfast and lunch, 4) we stopped often to take pictures.