Yesterday, we did a bike ride. The sheet of paper giving the rough route, kindly provided by the campsite said “It’ a easy route”. They lied. The first couple of hundred metres should have been a big enough omen of what was to come.<\/p>\n
It would have been a great ride but for the fact that recent & current forestry work had all but destroyed much of the trails, with 3 foot deep tyre & caterpillar track ruts in many places.<\/p>\n
Oh, and the impossibly steep climbs! They’re ok; you can push up them, but when you have impossibly steep climbs with huge ruts it’s a different matter. Joy started getting concerned about the thought that we’d have to come back down those climbs going in the opposite direction!<\/p>\n
In truth, it was a great ride with the highest point being at 1210m above sea-level. The weather held out long enough for us to have a picnic in the sunshine at a slight clearing at the top. We never met a single other person on the trail except – right at the top, we saw the couple from the caravan opposite us at the campsite: they had walked up with their dog. We went on a few hundred metres before heading back. Oddly, we didn’t pass them again so not sure where they went (but they were back in their van last night!).<\/p>\n
In some parts, we followed the Roman road (Flaminia Militare): some parts exposed and protected by signs, but most of it still buried. Perhaps a good thing as the unprotected parts have been eroded and most of the stones washed away where they are liberally strewn across the trail.<\/p>\n
Here’s<\/a> the route we followed.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday, we did a bike ride. The sheet of paper giving the rough route, kindly provided by the campsite said “It’ a easy route”. They lied. The first couple of hundred metres should have been a big enough omen of what was to come. It would have been a great ride but for the fact … Continue reading “Mountain biking & Roman roads”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[39,59,27,60],"class_list":["post-130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-european-tour","tag-italy","tag-la-futa","tag-mountain-biking","tag-tuscany"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farrimond.me.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farrimond.me.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farrimond.me.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farrimond.me.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farrimond.me.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/farrimond.me.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":132,"href":"https:\/\/farrimond.me.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions\/132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farrimond.me.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farrimond.me.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farrimond.me.uk\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}