day 8, saturday 7^th august 99

Early in the morning, in sleeping bag, in tent: -

Well, we've had thunder, we've had lightning and now we have torrential rain and serious cold. I've seen more rain on this trip than in the whole month before we left the UK and this is by far the heaviest.

Switzerland - you can fuck right off for me.

We pack up the tents etc. in the unceasing rain. For the first time on this trip, despite the huge (and growing) puddle outside it, my tent is packed first. I get my waterproofs on under the awning attached to a convenient German caravan. They have a table under their awning & are patently asleep still, so I leave my lid there to keep it out of the rain.

Crispin is staying behind as he must look for a bike shop to get his bearings fixed and Iain refuses point blank to get out of his sleeping bag ("Iain, it's fuckee-offee time" - "well fuckee-offee then"). Jeremy, marvin, Jeff and I leave at 8:30 a.m. and it's still raining. In order to prevent any running off without paying incidents, the campsite has taken marvin's passport. He pays & we go.

There's just one more mountain pass to go, still in the pouring rain, before we hit the border. Just near the border, we pause and I suggest a coffee stop to marvin, who says "no, we must keep going". Less than 5 minutes later, we leave Switzerland. I am so glad about this that I can't resist punching the air as I exit the border.

About 10 miles later, marvin takes pity on me and we pull into a cafe. The rain has stopped (of course - we're in Italy now!) so we squelch into the cafe. After marvin declares the day officially dry, we get rid of our waterproofs. We indulge in some hysterical laughter over my extremely wet boots that I refuse to empty as the water is now warm. To much amusement, marvin reveals that he has neither socks nor trolleys on today. He woke up, dying for a pee ("beyond pain") and just jumped into trousers & boots to go to the toilet block. When he came back, we were all packed, so he just ripped down his tent (ripped being the right word as he damaged it in the process) and jumped on his bike.

Jeff goes to the bog and comes back complaining that the cold and rain over the last pass has made his penis shrink. He seems to be rather concerned this may be a permanent state of affairs.

We slurp down our hot chocolates and munch down some breakfast cakes and are then off on our way again. Lots of twisties again. On one pass, I stop for a minute or two with Jeff. Jeremy pulls in and suggests that I lead for a while, as we have no turnings off this road for about 15 miles. Cool! I go straight into what Jeremy calls "the Zone" and fuck straight off into the distance having a really good time - leaving Jeremy and Jeff behind in the process. Lovely! I have an exceptional time, keeping Trixie in her power band (4K+) and enjoying the power to be found there, instead of just rolling on and off the low-end grunt as I usually do.

We stop for lunch in a very lovely village on top of a hill. The food is tremendously good - especially as we didn't actually know what we'd ordered. Jeremy (who is addicted to Italian food but has never been to Italy before) nearly orgasms where he sits!

After lunch (where we were joined by marvin), we start out of the village. Jeremy very nearly gets killed by an oncoming Italian driver who belts round a blind bend at 90+ on our side of the road. A very quick swerve is all that saves him.

Before we left, Andy 'Pieman' Gebhardt told us "Italian drivers are good but mad - even grannies take the racing line", and he wasn't kidding. In many ways they're better than the Swiss, but they don't have much in the way of lane discipline. Too often today one of us has had a moment of terror at the hands of one of these drivers.

As I ride, and am assaulted by more Italian loons, I decide that coming round a bend to find an oncoming car shall be known as a half Crispin; to achieve a full Crispin requires actually hitting the car. There are a lot of half-Crispins for each of us today, but we all manage to avoid the full Crispin.

At one point, going down a steep mountain road, I find a long queue of traffic. I work my way to the front of the queue to see a horse-box using the racing line for the descent. A horse box?! Presumably it was a race horse...

For the last third of the journey, I am sore and aching and I don't enjoy any of it. Our target for the day is a town called Villa Santina, where we are to meet Jim and Andy, along with Kevin and Liam, who have belted across Europe to join us for the middle bit of the journey. To get to the town, we have covered 278 miles. We can't find the others for a while and so sit in a cafe. We order beers but get something that seems to resemble watered down prune juice. Weird. When the others turn up, we find they've been looking for a campsite. I campaign vigorously for a hotel, but lose the fight. The cafe owner gives us directions to a campsite about 15 klicks away at Carvazzo. It's just by a lake & rather attractive - although we expect lots of midges etc.

About an hour after we arrive, Crispin and Iain turn up – top catching up! Now we are 10.

The food at the campsite is really good & very plentiful. We add beer and ice-cream to the mix and tell Kevin & Liam about the last few days' events.

Mileage: 298