We had a lie in until 8am today after the hard day yesterday and enjoyed the comfy bedsheets. The room was actually really big and nice – we had our own private covered balcony with table, chairs, and a plant. We set off at 9am and went through downtown Turin to get a glimpse of the historic plazas, statues, and the main glitzy shopping street. We had a quick stop in Decathlon, looking for camping gas, but they were out of stock, like the last three times we’ve checked. We also got Viki a new headlight, since the one she brought from Canada has been broken the whole time.
Next up was a cappuccino and croissants (one chocolate, one ricotta/chocolate nibs) for 5.80 EUR at a nice place on a pedestrianized boulevard. With that, we set off, maybe the latest we ever have, along the river Po, which we would take over 100km from Turin to Pavia. Disaster struck when I lost my sandals off my bike, biked an extra 4km to look for them, found one, but proceeded to lose it again shortly after.
Along route we messaged my friend Andres, who lives in Switzerland. Realizing that he works during the week, but we could make it to Switzerland by tomorrow if we re-routed, we decided to re-route so that we could spend some time with him and his girlfriend and they’d drive down from Zurich to around Como to meet us.
Fortunately for Strava heatmaps based routing, we got a good route downloaded to the gps and set off north-east, rather than east. This means we’ll skip Pavia and Milan, which may be for the best anyways. The afternoon was spent rolling through rice fields, and, excitingly for Viki, actually going through the village of Arborio. We ended shortly after, in Carpignano Sesia, right at 6pm, when Viki had to call in to work for 45 minutes. We just made it to a gelateria in time for her call.
We ended the day with a lovely dinner at a place called Ristorante Italia (there was a funny dialogue with me asking for an Italian restaurant and the gelato lady just repeating “Ristorante Italia”, me nodding, and that going in circles). We went to the (quite nice) restaurant terrace and spent the evening terrifying the waitress. We took it in turns to go “shower” in the bathroom, returning in different clothes. We ordered water, but then returned it after seeing how fancy it looked. After the length of time it took for the food to come, I tried to up my wine from 1/4L to 1/2L, but the waitress brought an extra 1/2L, which we returned. I also ate my through about 10 packs of breadsticks. I asked for olive oil to come with the bread and proceeded to make a mess of my napkin with overflowing olive oil. We were friendly and jovial, so had fun anyways. We obviously had to order risotto, and got porcini risotto as it’s prime porcini season right now. It was phenomenal. We also got a meat dish called sottofiletto al pep verde, which was delicious too.
We ended with setting up the tent in the dark by a sports field at the edge of town.
