Caley's Gran Fondo

After our stay on the Mediterranean we headed north to a town just outside of Cuneo, Italy!  We arrived two days before the actual race, so much less stressful that way.  We found a neat little town to have dinner in, and ended up going back there all the nights we were there.  The main square was hopping!  Several bars were blasting music outside, it was like they were competing to drown each other out.  Kind of funny since it was all weird techno house music.

The day before the race we went to Cuneo to pick up Caleys race stuff, and I got to meet the legendary Claudia who was running an incredible PR operation for the race, and who Caley has met several times at product launches.  After that we got ourselves out for a short ride around our hotel, even though it was only an hour, it was lovely!

The day of the race we were up super early just in case we had trouble finding parking etc.  There were roughly 2000 participants!  I waited with Caley at the start line until it was time to go, then headed back to our hotel for a nap before coming to meet him at the finish line, at what I thought was going to be about 6 hrs.....Turns out, the race took him almost 8!  Poor guy!  Turns out he wasn't quite prepared nutritionally for how hard and fast it was :(  I haven't found out where he ended up, but he definitely could have placed higher with better planning.

Thankfully we had the hotel for another night, it would have been brutal to drive home after that.  The next morning we took our time, and had a glorious drive home over the Alpes!  We opted to go over the mountains rather than through them.  Before coming to Europe, I thought the Eisenhower Tunnel was long....not true at all!  Last fall we went through a tunnel that took us about 20mins going 70kph, and the one we could have gone through to get home was even longer.  Plus, they are often toll roads, I think you have to pay about 40euros for this one!  I'm soooo glad we went over, the views were stunning!  About halfway over one mountain we decided to get out and hiked up a little rise for a quick snack picnic and picture taking opportunities.  I didn't get that many pics, Caley has most of them on his big camera, I'll try to steal some in the next few days to put up here. But in the meantime, here you go!