Fair Weather Bikers

I woke up feeling a lot more refreshed. It was an overcast day, but at least it wasn't raining and we put all the camping gear away dry.

Today we had a steady ride through the valley towards the Stelvio Pass. This ride went pretty well with the exception of my bloody bike continuing to drive me mad.

As we got to the Stelvio Pass, we started to get spots of rain, but luckily once we got on the main climb it remained dry. The climb up was not a lot of fun to be honest. The road is a bit of a nightmare on a fully loaded bike with lots of very tight up-hill hairpins. Very often you can be midway round the corner and an incoming vehicle will come towards you on the wrong side the road, simply because they have to take that line to make the corner. Over corner was a bit of a gamble and I had countless heart in my mouth moments where I thought the bike was going down.

Once we got to the top - it was very wet. We stopped briefly for some photos and decided to crach on. One we were on the other side, the weather really turned. It was very wet and very cold. I had heated grips, but Daz and Nig were really suffering with frozen hands.

We decided to get off the mountain and find a hotel or B and B rather than camping, which instantly improved the mood of everybody.

We headed into Lavigno, which was a lovely town and found a nice hotel which was a pretty good price and had a covered garage where we could keep the bikes nice and dry.

Once we were in the room and out of our wet gear, everyone cheered up instantly. We hung up all our stuff to dry and then headed out to explore the town. The rain continued on and off for the rest of the evening and it was quite cold so we were very pleased with our decision to find a hotel.

It was a very fun town, with querky pub and lots going on. We saw marching bands and street performers and lots of lovely bars. One of the bars served free nuts - as many as you want, and they encouraged you to throw the shells on the floor, the floor was covered in shells. Nig had discover the phrase 'ciao bella' which he proceeded to say to everybody!

We had a lovely meal and quite a few beers before returning to our hotel around midnight.