Distance: 50mi or so of riding
Climbing: around 1000 feet total
Descending: same
Difficulty: generally pretty easy
Link to longest ride in Strava

---

Link to photo gallery from this trip

---

It was almost de rigeur to have Aperol Spritzes all over Europe. Lori decided she liked Hugo spritzes better, though not all of them were electric green like this one

Trains from Florence to Rome were a little annoying but we made it without too much hassle, and proceeded to our AirBnB, which was in an alley once again in an old part of town. The front door was only half-width so we weren't sure about bringing our bikes in, and left them outside for the first little while, as we shifted into worry mode about the logistics of getting home in a few days.

We biked straight over to the shop that had responded to our emails - the only shop out of a half dozen - to see about getting some bike boxes from them. We arrived just before close and while the owner neither spoke english nor was apparently involved in the email thread, a customer who was visiting the shop helped us translate and we ended up with two huge boxes about 1.5 mile from our apartment. We lugged the boxes awkwardly across town by foot, then worked our way back to the shop having drinks, and eventually dinner on the way home with our bikes.

hundreds of the tens of thousands of artworks the Vatican owns

Lori had booked us the first Vatican tour of the morning and our tour guide was a slightly silly British ex-pat who gave us a little tour, and a little soap opera history of the Vatican, which has been a sovereign nation for quite a few centuries, in addition to being for the most part the seat of the Catholic church. The tour was mostly of the building and art, learning a lot about how artists in the renaissance operated. The tour stopped just outside the Sistine Chapel, which we carried on into on our own.

Like many other places in Italy, the chapel itself - and the Vatican in general - were a tourist mosh pit, and after looking around for a few minutes, the crowd's nouse had grown to be TOO MUCH and suddenly a booming voice came down from on high: SILENZIO! SILENCE! It was not God, just one of the zillion guards the Vatican has in place to guard its thousands of treasures. We took this as our sign to move on, having seen enough Michelangelo for the day. We filtered out past some other art works and out into the world.

Before we could really relax, we had to make sure we could get our bikes packed up, so we googled up a shipping supply store and stopped by to buy tape, bubble wrap, extra cardboard, and more tape. There was a little language barrier - the proprietor of the store spoke little English and Google Translate did not do a good job on "bubble wrap" nor "tape measure" but we eventually got what we were after, and even saw some other sites. We thought we'd found the Coliseum, but it was a smaller, different 2000-year-old building instead. Good enough for government work on a hot afternoon, we decided!

We later went on a tour of St Peter's Basilica, which is the other "main thing" in Vatican City. It was a very impressive building, with impressive art (largely mosaics) and sculpture, though our tour guide was a little tired and cranky by the end of her day.

sights from along the River Tiber

The next day we took a long bike ride on the bike path that runs along the Tiber river. It was car-free and almost cyclist free. Lori's derailleur battery stopped working just after we set out, so we went back and got the charged one and carried on, in the other direction but still along the river.

Had one last, great meal in Italy on a piazza. Food was great, limoncello was free, and we ended up stuffed. Then we spent a lot of hours boxing our bikes up...and it all worked out in the end: bikes were boxed after much effort. Cab was on time, and fit our bikes. Bikes were allowed on the flight, and while we got a little hung up in the customs line in Seattle on the way home, we made it only a couple of hours late, and were overjoyed to see our beds and the cats!