I spent a couple of weeks cycling and hiking out of Tromsø in 2022.
Returned to start a long cycling tour summer 2023.
It’s an unforgettable tourist destination. All the cruise ships stop.
It’s a year round attraction. Winter is even more popular as folks come to find the northern lights.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube. Two of my favourite travel vloggers.
Want more?
During the pandemic I had plenty of time to research future adventures.
#1 on my bucket list was cycling Norway.
Why?
My inspiration was MatthewNorway. He put together my 3000km planned itinerary, as well. Wish me luck. 😀
I start south today. Canada Day. 🇨🇦
Shout out for Tromsø Outdoor, an excellent bike shop.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
The series of novels by American academic and crime-writer Donna Leon, featuring Commissario Brunetti in Venice are easy reads.
I got hooked on them while traveling in Italy. I could listen to one audio book a day!
Read the first 5 starting with Death at La Fenice.
Ended up reading 11 more:
Recommended.
I arrived northern Italy stomach sick from Tuscany.
Mikey found me a free place to stay. And a secure lock-up for the bike.
Day 1 = LAUNDRY.
Mikey and I had coached together in Bermuda.
He’s a world adventurer with big plans for future projects. Mikey only works long enough to get enough cash for his next challenge.
One day I cycled along the river north towards Bolzano on the Val d’Adige cycle path.
Those cliffs in the background welcome more wingsuit and BASE jumpers than anywhere else in the world. Trento is where new jumpers go to learn.
Mikey has hundreds of jumps already. And has started teaching wingsuit, as well.
I paid my first entrance fee in crowded Europe 2023 to visit the museum at Buonconsiglio Castle.
My initial plan to volunteer to WORK for a ticket was rejected. 😀
Trento is a cool tourist city. Better than Bolzano, I reckon, as a jumping off point for the western Dolomites.
There’s a good museum (MUSE) as a number of different Universities.
Tourists walk the pedestrian streets of the old town.
When Mikey stored my bike, I was free to takeoff with just my backpack:
The hiking highlight was getting back to my favourite day hike in the world ➙ Harder Ridge.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Thanks Mikey!
In the years I’ve done multi-day cycling, my biggest gear problem has NOT been flat tires.
BIGGEST PROBLEM has been tying additional gear to my bike.
After dozens of methods that didn’t really work, I’m finally using Rok Straps.
EXCELLENT.
They are cargo straps without hooks, most often used on motorcycles.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
More popular with cyclists are Voile straps.
I hadn’t seen AJ in over 35 years. Not since he moved to Munich, Germany.
We’d coached together at Altadore back in the 1980s. And were College roommates for some months, as well.
But when he invited me to a big birthday party in southern Spain, I really wanted to go.
And it was superb. AJ is an excellent event organizer.
It started Friday night on the rooftop of the 5 star Gran Hotel Gvadalapin Banus in Marbella.
Two birthdays were celebrated. AJ and one of his original business partners from Munich in AJ’s Fitness. This is Bettina, a classy lady. She and her husband are an impressive couple.
The guests were friends from the fitness studio — as well as friends and family from North America. AJ’s husband Darin is originally from Reno. (A very funny guy. Constantly entertaining. They’ve been together for 31 years.)
Saturday afternoon was a pool party. I skipped it fearing all large bodies of water. 😀
Saturday night was the BIG party at a huge, exclusive villa.
I slept on the upstairs patio couch.
You’d be correct in ASSuming that a smelly backpacker was out of place in a mansion this impressive. 😀
Birthday presentations.
I was happy and honoured to be able to attend.
I do love southern Spain, too. If forced to live amongst the chain smoking Europeans, it would be in Andalusia.
My #2 choice would be Portugal.
Having run out of books in Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme series, I resorted to trying one of his stand alone novels.
Very good.
When a night-time call to 911 from a secluded Wisconsin vacation house is cut short, offduty deputy Brynn McKenzie leaves her husband and son at the dinner table and drives up to Lake Mondac to investigate. Was it a misdial or an aborted crime report?
Brynn stumbles onto a scene of true horror and narrowly escapes from two professional criminals. She and a terrified visitor to the weekend house, Michelle, flee into the woods in a race for their lives. …
Sounds somewhat conventional?
Not at all. This book is all twist and turns. It kept me guessing.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Spook Street (2017) is the 5th book in the Slough House series — and the best so far.
Herron is an entertaining writer. Most of the best lines are from boss Jackson Lamb who’s a bigoted, philistine, obese, spectacularly flatulent, alcoholic chain-smoker.
Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman plays Lamb in the TV series.
What happens when an old spook loses his mind? Does the Service have a retirement home for those who know too many secrets but don’t remember they’re secret? Or does someone take care of the senile spy for good?
Amazon
These are the paranoid concerns of David Cartwright, a Cold War–era operative and one-time head of MI5 who is sliding into dementia, and questions his grandson, River, must figure out answers to now that the spy who raised him has started to forget to wear pants. But River, himself an agent at Slough House, MI5’s outpost for disgraced spies, has other things to worry about. A bomb has detonated in the middle of a busy shopping center and killed forty innocent civilians. The “slow horses” of Slough House must figure out who is behind this act of terror before the situation escalates.
An awesome book.
Demon Copperhead is a 2022 novel by Barbara Kingsolver. It was a co-recipient of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and won the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Though Kingsolver lives in southern Appalachia, I can’t fathom how effectively she puts herself into the mind of the boy — Demon Copperhead. It’s a coming of age story.
Ground zero of the opium epidemic. Demon is born to a drug-using teenage single mother in a trailer in Lee County, Virginia.
Since his mother is in and out of rehab, Demon is partly raised by the sprawling, warm-hearted Peggot clan.
Almost everyone in this dirt poor place is drastically hurt by the Sackler family’s killer drug OxyContin.
“I don’t know a single person my age that’s not taking pills,” Demon says at one point.
The Sacklers paid a $6 billion settlement to avoid civil lawsuits. It’s fair to call them killers.
I listened to the audio book. Recommended, as the reader has the right accent and tone of voice.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
I love all pizza.
But if forced to name my best ever, I say Sorbillo’s in Naples. Gorgonzola, ham, mushroom. Fantastic. And inexpensive.
When I first travelled Italy at age-17, Rockin’ Ronnie introduced me to Calzone. Oven-baked folded pizza made with leavened dough. It originated in Naples, as well.
Back in Italy in 2023, I thought I’d further explore the pizza homeland.
Alice Pizza is a super popular chain. Light, airy dough made with little yeast.
Of 60 varieties, my server in Lucca recommended something unique. Like a pizza ham sandwich. Served cold, not hot. Delicious.
In the mountainous north, Mikey likes a Trento pizzeria run by a family from Napoli.
This was the combo recommended to me by the boss. Spinach. Pork. …
This Capricciosa in an airport restaurant was surprisingly good. Plenty of artichokes.
Rick McCharles 