Lake Maggiore

The bike shop...finally!

June 22 Somma-Arona

Well, today has started no different than yesterday seeing as we woke up at 10:00 again. We rushed around getting things ready. After all of that, I decided to go see if breakfast was still up even though it closed at ten. Thankfully it was and Nate and I were able to grab a quick bite before heading out. After breakfast we asked the desk attendant where the nearest bike shop was. (You can almost guess by now) The bike shop was in the direction we had come from the night before. We passed three towns trying to get to the bike shop and stopped multiple times to ask for directions. Each time, the people sent us down the road. (I was beginning to wonder if this was just a technique Italians use when they don’t really know the way). Finally, we found the bike shop…in GALLARATE!!! We were so thrilled to find it, that we didn’t even think of how hard it would be to try to order the parts in a different language. After some labored parlance and a lot of gesturing, the shop owner was able to put another spacer in our cassette and gave us some extra tubes, CO2 cartridges, and a pump. (Thank goodness). Even though we had backtracked all the way to the beginning, we were both in considerably better moods after this one stop. Once we were ready, we loaded up all our stuff again and headed out on the busy but direct route to Lake Maggiore. It only took about an hour to find Lake Maggiore on this direct route.
Once we hit the lake, we just had to decide where we wanted to stay for the night. We passed a big town called Arona and decided to keep our eye out for campgrounds. We didn’t want to go into Switzerland just yet so we stayed in a little place called Solcio. The campground was right on the lake. The most exciting part of the stay was that some other tourists arrived who spoke English! It’s the little things here that make us happiest. Ian and Ruth were from Australia. They’ve been here now about two weeks and they’ve been touring in Switzerland and France which is exactly where we’re heading. We were able to sit down with them and get some great pointers on touring. They even had cycling books for Italy and France which we found very helpful. We talked late into the night and hopefully we’ll stay in contact through e-mail.
~35k

Mo