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Still Got My Kidneys
We slept the night through without incident. Upon arising, I checked my kidneys. "Yep, still there," I happily reported. "The blood-thirsty shepherds have been foiled again. We must be living right!" "Even more remarkable," Sharon said, looking out the tent door, "the wind is still behind us!" We started pedalling with the wind. Unfortunately, the mountainous terrain proved difficult and made for slow going. Near noon, we stopped in a small mountain village, and I hustled into a bread shop. Not surprisingly, I was told the bread was finito. The little Sardinian bakeries probably experienced few day-to-day sales variations - they knew exactly how many loaves they would sell and they baked exactly that amount. Simply put: if we didn't buy bread before the regulars, we went without. On days we managed to scoop bread, our sudden appearance probably threw the shop's forecasting for a loop. I fancied the baker explaining to a regular customer later: "Sorry, Mrs. Bertucci, but two hungry bikers came in this morning and bought your loaves." We ate lunch (sans bread) in a playground. As we did, roosters strutted back and forth on main street, flapping and crowing. But we weren't taken aback by the free-roaming fowl: we had adapted to Sardinia's rural atmosphere. In fact, I now found the strolling poultry less incongruent than the rock music that was blaring from a house across the street. We carried on our way, ever upwards. In Laconi, out of water, I stopped at a house with an outside faucet and knocked on the door to ask permission to fill our water bottles. There was no response, so I helped myself. I was almost finished filling our bottles when a movement above caught my eye. I glanced skyward. There, on a second-story balcony, stood an old woman glaring at me like I was some common thief. Caught red-handed, I tried to make the best of it. "Grazie!" I called up to her. "Niente," (nothing) she replied. "Canada," I said, trying to make small-talk. "Africa?" she asked. "Morocco," I guess I should have answered, but instead thought, Yikes! Am I getting that dark? And there hadn't even been much sun. With all the nationalities I had been mistaken for - American, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, Moroccan, and African - I figured I must be the most generic cyclist in the world. We left Laconi and cycled ever upwards. In the late afternoon, we set up the tent in a sheltered spot behind some bushes. |
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