Leaving Venice and on to Slovenia

 Sunday Sep 20

Nancy and I left our lovely Lido campground early on Sunday morning to catch the ferry back to Tronchetto and to make our way to Venice's Santa Lucia train station. The ferry ride was a treat once again with the morning sun lighting the ornate facades if the churches, villas and palaces we passed.

Morning light on Venice from the ferry




I had routed out a way to get to the station with the bikes, knowing that one obstacle awaited us - getting across a pedestrian bridge with a lot of steps! There was no other way to get there. So once again we did the "luggage lug" back and forth, with no knights-in-shing-armour making an appearance!

Getting ready for the task ahead.
It happens to be a lovely bridge called Ponte de la Constitizione, partly made of glass that they say gets very slippery in the rain

Luggage-lug completed!


All went well - got ourselves tickets to the town of Udine, and the train left 10 mins later. No trouble getting spots for the bikes as the train was quiet. The ride was about two hours with many local stops.

Here you can see where Udine is relative to Venice, and close to the Slovenia border.

Surprise, surprise, Udine train station does not have lifts, so another long luggage lug had to be done to get under the platforms to the exit. We're used to this now and consider it part of our cross-training (no pun intended!)


The story of our tour!!


From Udine we began riding a route I had planned out towards the Slovenia border, going through the historic town of Cividale de Friuli.


Cividale de Friuli and its lovely Devil's bridge


Unfortunately we discovered that a number of the campgrounds along today's route were closed, so we were even considering wild camping. The countryside and River we were following would have lent itself nicely to that. But it turned out we found a fine little camping place in a semi-official campground next to a bar and restaurant with a super-friendly host. We had our own little patch of grass, albeit close to the road. There was just one other caravan/trailer there besides us. And we enjoyed our post-ride beers and our dinner at their quiet establishment in the countryside.

This caravan was the only other
camping unit other than us

This piece of grass is where our tents were

The following morning, Monday we set off to ride the remaining approx 15km to reach the Slovenian border and head into country number 4 on this tour. We were looking forward to seeing this country, first time for both of us. And having been here for several days now, I can tell you we're loving it! So hopefully I'll get a chance to tell you all about it very soon.

Slovenia here we come!




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