Breakfast at the Best Western was typical of a chain hotel, not like a BnB. It was OK. My friends left for the airport. I walked into the village looking for an ATM. I wasn’t even going to get on the bike without cash. The first ATM Google indicated turned out to be within a bank that was closed and locked for the weekend. The owner of the Gelati shop next door directed me to another one 500m away. It was dead slow, but it worked. I had 3 goes, with my 2 debit cards, in between letting locals in, and I got a wad of cash. Actually 2 wads, in 2 wallets, with 2 cards, in 2 separate places. I feel prepared now. Back to the gelati shop to buy one, and say grazie.
I still did not know where I was going. The Guzzi Museum my friends recommended was in Mandello del Lario, on the shore of Lake Como. I had passed it on the previous day. Since it next opened on Monday afternoon at 3pm, seeing it meant spending 2 days in the area. I decided to keep going south and head for La Spezia. Generally, my goals on this trip are to ride the Alps, get to Sicily, visit the Amalfi Coast, Cinque Terre, and a few architectural sites. I’m not going to Switzerland after all. Time is tight with only 3 weeks on the bike, and the cool Swiss efficiency with which they relieve you of hundreds of euros for the tiniest speeding infraction has put me off going there. Maybe next year, by train. I booked a room in a BnB in La Spezia using Booking.com. For ten years I have used Tripadvisor, but Booking.com has almost all the properties listed, with reviews, and the app works quite well. It’s so easy.
Straight down the autostrada to La Spezia. I pulled into a Servizio somewhere, and unlocked the fuel cap on the bike. Almost immediately, a guy in a red T shirt appeared, and inserted the nozzle, spilling petrol over the bike. I can spill petrol over the bike myself, without his help. I paid him directly. Maybe this is their way of reducing drive away theft of petrol. It seems that in Italy there are 2 grades of diesel and only one grade of petrol. I assume it must be high octane, because some very exotic vehicles burn it. By 5:30 I was was in my room at BnB Casa Celsi, Via Riccardo Migliari, 6 Piano 3, La Spezia. Giuseppena’s apartment was a typically spotless Italian home, lovingly furnished and decorated.
She was a great host, very helpful with information. I realised that I should have booked 2 nights. She had no vacancy for the 26th, so she called her friend Roberto, who had a spare room a few metres away in his BnB. Problem solved. Another problem cropped up, the SIM newly installed the previous evening was not working. Plenty of signal but no data. It had worked fine about 50km back, at a servizio, but not here. I popped the Vodafone SIM back in, and was on the air again. At least Giuseppena’s wifi worked well. She recommended a restaurant at the port which serves freshly caught seafood.
La Spezia is a nice town. I was there briefly with Anne in 2003 when we went to Cinque Terre, but I hadn’t seen the town at all. I walked down to the port, wrote some stuff and joined the queue for the 7pm evening opening. It must be good if people were prepared to queue like this. I had to guard my place in the queue very carefully, as you do here, but it was worth it.