Hope lost and found, bikes broken and fixed
This morning, after camping somewhere that was less campground in the American sense and more trailer park (but the trailers all the sort of camper you can tow behind a car) near the town of Orbetello, we found it to be Tuesday morning, and an auspicious time to find an open bike shop. For the record, the Saturday before Easter in Italy is a poor time to figure out that your derailleur is a little bent. Not much is open on Easter Sunday and, as we found, not much is open on Easter Monday either. But this morning we found the little hole in the wall bike shop in Orbetello, Giro Bicycle on Via Dante Aligheri for those who might be looking for it later, opened for the morning at 9 and the beer-bellied man inside looked over our bikes, adjusted a derailleur here and trued a wheel there for 18 euros. And when we said we were headed to Barcelona he suggested we take the train. Anyway.
We took only one or two wrong turns and with minimal backtracking had a sunny day biking from the coast through Tuscany, or Maremma, which is what it says on the maps we got from the tourism office in Orbetello. (By the way, they had an awesome packet of ride descriptions in English with maps there.) Green pastoral rolling hills with vineyards, sheep, the occasional horse or picturesque villa. Very nice. I think there are probably lots of postcards featuring what we saw today.
We culminated in a 8 km/5 mi moderate hill climb to Marciano, a medieval hilltop town, with a big ol’ stone tower fortress thing on the top. The town features many narrow and steep streets that are probably highly defensible against the Ottomans, or the Visigoths, or the Medicis, or whoever. We arrived at the town and started up one of the streets, at which point there was a sort of chunk noise and the chain just plain fell off the taller half’s bike. “Shit,” I said, and picked it up. He looked at it and laughed a little in bemusement because what else can you do when your chain gives up on the third riding day of a two month tour.
We started up the hill top on foot and wound our way through increasingly narrow streets, receiving looks from Italians of various ages. Have I mentioned that my bike/rain jacket is vibrant purple and his is a fluorescent goldenrod yellow? Many Italians seem to go with black leather jackets so we kinda stick out. That and if you look closer and see that other than the freckles I am whiter than white, its kinda obvious that we aren’t from around here.
We follow the signs marked “i” which should be information. This leads up and up and around, to the fortress on the hill. Along the way we see exactly one bike. It doesn’t seem like a bike friendly town, topographically. Either you’d kill yourself going up, or you’d kill yourself and several of your neighbors on the way downhill. When we reached the final approach to the edifice atop the hill, the taller half said, “I’m not going up that.”
”I’ll go,” I said. “You wait with the bikes.”
The stone edifice currently houses a museum, and the reception is also the tourist information office. The woman at the desk didn’t speak English, but she wanted to help. I trotted out my best Italian, which is really Spanish peppered with the Italian words I have picked up in the last week.* “Hay una problema con la mia bicicletta. E una… negozione par las bicilettas? Riparazione?”
She made some phone calls while I consulted her dictionary. “La caneta e romperato,” I tried.
”La caneta e rata,” she said. There was not a bike shop in town, I understood from her, but I should go to a place called Gobbini, where they have… she fumbled through through the dictionary. Tractors. Someone at the tractor store fixes bikes.
”Penso chi a bisogno una nuova caneta,” I said, hoping to communicate this might be a problem a tractor mechanic would not be able to fix.
She made another call and handed me a sticky note with a name and a phone number. Simone. Okay, I said, and reviewed what I understood. Simone is a mechanic. Simone is at Gobboni. Gobboni is on Via Delle Fonti, but she couldn’t tell me a street number. She drew me a line on the map of how to get to the beginning of the street and then began pointing to arms and legs and asking me something. Eventually I caught the word “cada”. Did I fall?
”No, non cada,” I verified, and added some additional info with words I had looked up while she was on the phone. “La bicicletta chi rota e la bicicletta de mi marito. I mi marito non cada. Solo la caneta a cada!” Then I said “grazie mille” a bunch of times. I wanted to hug her, but I didn’t know how it would go over.
A bit later and the taller half and I found Gobbini’s “machine agricole” and Simone. On one side of the lot, which was indeed full of tractors and agricultural machinery, was a small building absolutely full of bikes. Carbon fiber bikes, mostly. And wheels and tools and piles of parts, making up a bike shop to make our spoiled Seattle hearts proud. And ten euros and ten minutes later, the chain was fixed and we had a chain tool and spare links for each of our bikes.
Then we checked into a hotel, went to a restaurant and ate too much pasta and gnocchi and came up with a blessing for all bike tourers: May there always be a bike shop where you need one most.
*If you actually speak Italian, I apologize for the broken-ness of the pseudo Italian in this post. If you don’t speak Italian, I can’t recommend using these phrases unless you’re really stuck.
