Welcome Back for Season 6! Adriatic Odyssey.
Welcome to new readers and welcome back to loyal readers of the Shifting Gears blog! As we say…here we go again. On September 24th, Heather & I start cycling from Trieste, Italy through Croatia, Montenegro, Albania and back to Italy, ending in Puglia. This ride is over 1,000 miles, climb 57,000 feet (that’s 2 Mount Everests of climbing!) and should take 4 weeks. Here is a visual – starting in Trieste Italy, which is a 2-hour drive from Venice airport where we are flying. Our final stop is Bari, on the East Coast of Italy, on the Adriatic. The map image is fairly accurate but AI has it’s limits so it misses a small slice of Slovenia that touches the Adriatic for about 25 miles, south of Trieste and before Croatia begins. You can see the full details of our planned itinerary in the chart at the bottom of this blog. We’ll ride self-supported – just two of us, carrying 25+ pounds each in our panniers (saddlebags) on our bikes, with no support van! Why call it an Odyssey? About 30 years...