Saturnia

May 21 Weekend
We were down in the southern Toscana Region this weekend. We started with a long long train ride from bologna to Florence, then to Prato, then to Pisa, then to Albinia. Albinia is about an hour north of Rome. When we left Pisa we were given a ticket by the train dudes because we went the wrong route from Florence and got on a different train and so our trip was going to be like ten kilometers longer than expected. He charged us the 1.50 and added a fee of 8.00. He did it cause he wanted to show off for this chick that was sitting across from us. I got really pissed off and started to cuss him out in English which he didn’t understand which was cool because he probably would have kicked us off the train which would have caused me to get even more mad and someone would have gotten hurt! To top it off shortly after some idiot at the back of the train started to play with the ringers on his phone. I was still mad from the ticket and I turned around and yelled at him. He was like 35 years old, but he needed to get scolded and nobody had the balls to say anything but me. He stopped. We made it to our destination Albinia, then we got on our bikes and rode to the bed and breakfast about 20km away from the train station.
The B&B was awesome with four cats, two dogs, a horse, a donkey, four goats, lots of chickens and lots of geese. We settled in and had a good time there.
Saturday morning Mario who owned the B&B took us on a tour of the area and showed us Saturnia which was a natural hot springs that the romans used to bath in thousands of years ago. Now its just a cool waterfall with about twenty tourists siting in it. Too bad we never got to take a dip. Then we went to manciano where our race started. We checked in and got our free wine and cheese. We gave our wine to Mario and ate our cheese. We have grown to love the cheese here. We never know what we are getting but we will just grab a chunk of it and some deli meat and dig in. The rest of the day we relaxed and we also went for a short bike ride in the country side.
Sunday Morning we awoke to a sunny day… We knew that we had a tough day in store for us with the heat of the summer, the wind from the ocean and the long hills of over 20 km each. Mario drove us to the start line and we started on our journeys of 130 and 170km’s.