Hot, hot, hot

Everyone’s getting a bit of extreme hot weather at the moment, and northern Italy isn’t the worst, but cycling through 34˚C with a reasonably high humidity seemed pretty hot to us. It actually feels just as hot as the 40˚C we had in Australia and India. We just have to take a few more breaks, and when we do, we sit inside and try to cool down.

Otherwise, everything’s pretty ideal — riding through the Po valley means it’s all nice and flat and the roads aren’t too bad. There’s not often any shoulder to ride on, but the traffic is pretty considerate and we rarely have anyone pass close.

We’re heading to Turino now, where we’re getting a new rim fitted to the back wheel of the Blue Strawberry. It’s developed some cracks, so we need to sort this out. We’ve had to get the rim shipped from the UK as it’s pretty specialist, and it looks like it may not turn up until Monday, so we could be handing around in Turino a little while.

Then we’re climbing up into the Alps, taking a pass called the Col de Mont Cenis, which looks eminently achievable by a tandem loaded with luggage. We’ll see how that goes when we get there, but it’s the highest we’ll have been on our bikes in the whole trip.