After a long journey and arriving in the dark, it’s always a pleasure to wake up in the morning to see you’ve landed on your feet when it comes to the destination.
Embedded within the seaside promenade line of team trucks and smaller shop team EZ-ups we woke at sunrise and headed down the beach, an all of 50 metre walk for a swim in the Med and the first of many ice cold beach showers (of course team singletrack were the only one’s taking shower gel to wash on the beach). If there’s a better way to start the day I’m not sure what it is.
Finale Ligure is one of those places everyone should visit to ride, but for the first few days we were here to track down a few stories so it was a case of grabbing a coffee and getting to work. Three days of tracking down racers and their bikes, trying to grab time with them in between racing fueled mainly on €1 espresso and whatever’s free in the Enduro World Series press centre.
By the time the last race of the series celebrations have gone down and the migration of racers has begun we’ve got a couple of spare days before heading to our next destination on the roadtrip planner; Frejús for the Roc d’Azur. It’s a chance to find a campsite and get a bit of riding and photoshooting in the bag.
Typically the blue sky weather we’ve been enjoying breaks and in pour the clouds, right about when we’re heading up stage three of the EWS course.
We settle into a day of sketchy riding, straightlining, and generally trying not to brake too much while vaguely steering the bike down various trail features. A day of “one more time” riding on stuff it’s getting hard to survive on. Squeezing every little bit of light out of a gloomy sky to try and grab some pictures. But the rain is warm, the air smells of mushrooms and there’s little neolithic caves to explore and hide out of the rain in. We’re counting it as a good day.
A quick post-ride pizza and we head off west to France, taking the coast road for a bit of sightseeing and scooter dodgems until we leave Italy. Once more it’s dark when we reach our destination but at least this time it’s a proper, legit, campsite; with hot showers and everything. With the van full of wet gear it’s time to try and get some kit drying and while the engine’s still hot it seems a shame to waste it…
