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February 24 Friday Bicycle touring Italy Sardinia from a creek before Nuoro Sardinia to an abandoned farmhouse (barn, actually) past Nuoro Sardegna The wind picked up in the middle of the night. It was still blowing strongly this morning -- right in our faces. The sky is totally overcast. Ugly. Brutto. Headwinds are not good for freewheeling bicycle touring. A few kilometres down the road from where we camped, a police car with three policemen in it honked at us and the driver stuck his arm out the window for us to stop. We reined our fully loaded touring bicycles in (stopping in the middle of the road beside the cop car, actually). The driver just kept shaking his head as they asked us all the usual questions. Then in a new twist, he asked us for our passport. Sharon and I were draped over our handlebars, too tired to barely move. We both pointed to our front handlebar bags where we keep our passports, and said "Si." Neither of us felt like digging through our stuff to get them out. He didn't pursue it. Questions most frequently asked: Where are you from? Where are you going? How many miles (or kilometres) do you go each day? How far have you gone altogether? Are you married? How long have you been married? How many kids do you have? What! None!? What do you do for work? How old are you? Where did you get the money to do this? When we tell them, "We sold our house," they don't fathom that too well. Utter disbelief about sums it up. For Italians all is lost when someone sells their house. That is the last straw. They can't imagine we can just go out and buy another one somewhere else. In Nuoro we must have figured we hadn't climbed enough or cycled into the wind long enough already, we had to go up Mount Ortobene to check out the house built into a rock. Curious symbiosis. Someone lives in it. There was smoke coming out the chimney and even a TV antennae. We cycled farther down the road, stopping at one spot to pick almonds off trees alongside the road. Some trees are burnt -- those must be the toasted variety. We hit the almonds with a rock to crack them open. Tonight we found an old deserted farmhouse (actually the barn is the only thing left standing) for shelter from the frigid wind. |
