The Alpes and other miracles

The Alpes and other miracles

As all of our intentions grew towards riding over the Alpes our minds were drawn to such questions as to weather and the passability of the Alpes pass. My own mind, which has actually rarely left it, was on Shanfu's ailing and repaired, warped and cracking, derailleur hanger. On a fine day out of some town in Italy along our route that no longer has any resemblance to the EuroVelo 8 route, her shifting once again became problematic and I saw that the repaired hanger was in fact cracking distressingly. The hopes of crossing the Alpes and in fact continuing on our trip now was squarely upon the shoulders of a miracle and the city of Torino providing it.
Let me say at the outset that Italy seems to hide their campgrounds, often with little or no signage, and pretty much always at the top of a lung busting hill. The hills offer striking views, but at the end of a cycling day and always dragging a trailer, these "beyond category" hills are never a welcome sight. Really exceptional views though.
We found the camp site which was on the land of a beautiful, hard to describe, villa. The next morning we struck out on foot to find a bicycle store or two to see if we could find the replacement part in question. We found a bicycle shop with a big friendly Bianchi flag waving in front of it and ventured in. He said that he didn't have that exact part but that the bicycle shop just a few storefronts down might have it. We found out soon after that the shops were related. The second shop did in fact have the part, and we of course looked at it dumbfounded and sure that it couldn't be true. We bought it anyway and without the Italian language skills to do so we tried to explain how he had just saved our trip, and said inexplicable things to him about Croatia and Montenegro. He smiled and didn't understand a word of it. No matter. We went on further to one more bicycle shop so that I could buy replacement cleats for my cycling shoes as mine looked like they had been thrown into a blender with badgers in it. They had, in fact. Also, new brake pads which were also less than reliable looking at that point. All in all we ended up finding everything that we needed. We went back to camp and I installed everything that could be installed and suddenly, after I guess hundreds and hundreds of miles, we were back in total working order. The Alpes were suddenly very much in our sights and the next day we hit the road.
We really liked Torino and even to the point of now feeling the need to go back, learning Italian and finding a place to live. Really really stupidly cool city.



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