OK, we left Venice, and followed our Garmins to Vicenza! And this was pretty cool, at least for us. Scootah and I have identical Garmin Oregon 600 GPS’s, just as we previously had identical Garmin e-Trex Legend HCX GPS’s. And every year I reset everything to factory defaults on both boxes, load each with identical firmware and map sets then set everything for cycle mode.
And every year we each set to navigate to the same spot and each GPS picks a different route. It’s like they say: when you have two watches,moi never know what time it is…
So this year, knowing where (in general) we were going, I went online and created GPS tracks every possible bike route where we were heading. These were loaded into each GPS, and we could call them up and follow the same track. Magic! Especially as the tracks were based on actual official bike routes, not what a handheld Garmin would guess.
So the ride was great. Packed up in the morning, and hit the ferries to the mainland…
We navigated the roads through Mestre and out to the country. Not dedicated bike lanes everywhere, but secondary farm roads for the most part.
OK, that was avoiding highway…
THIS is farmland… 
Our route was through Padua (or is that Padova?) (another five blend available there), a college town (as in Galileo studied there) with not only relics of some saint, but a race track around the central square…
Then onward to Vicenza…almost. It was getting late, and we had many miles under the tires, as well as a broken spoke on my back wheel, so we high tailed it to the campground just out of town with a total of 104km on the day.
Next morning we did a quick pop into Vicenza (see my 2005 blog for hi lights), then continued on.
So, remember my pre-loaded GPS tracks? Well, the one toward Verona passed BY Vicenza; we bike out to get in the trail, and it turns out there was a bunch of road construction going on where we got close to the trail. Long story short: we found the trail,many headed in the wrong direction. Back towards Venice. Sigh.
Aboutn15 or 20 km later (although through stunningly beautiful countryside) we realize our (my) error, and we backtrack to Vicenza. Where we suck it up, and buy train tix to Verona.
And what a Verona! We bike into the main plaza, with it’s Roman Arena, where I attempt to earn beer money the Victorian way…
As the Italians say: “no”.
Beautiful town tho, so we camp above it in the Castle de Pietra campground (think funky hostel in dilapidated medieval walls). Spend another day exploring and later,making in the opera ‘Don Giovani’ performed in the Roman arena. Very cool!
Ds
