A Huge Caldera!

Day 6: Rob’s coffee! You can tell by now that this will continue all the way into Rome, right?

On our way out of town. Not too early today. 



It felt like fall for the first time. 9° to start the day! Time to pull on my sleeves. 

Nice sunrise. 





Early Saturday morning. The hunters are already out and busy with their dogs and their guns.

It was a lovely morning. You can see Radicofani in the distance, centre screen. Two stages back. 

Once again there is evidence of the drought that hit Italy this year. The sunflowers were half their regular size.

Here and there there was a late bloomer which kind of took a drab situation and brightened it. 

Start of the stage was pretty flat, that is once we’re out of town.

A nice soft light greeted us with wisps of ground fog in some places. 







We bumped into an Ozzy couple from Melbourne who has started at the GSB pass in Italy. We spoke with them for a few minutes, long enough to hear that they were going to take a rest day and Balsana. We said goodbye and continued on.

Rob doing his thing!😂











We arrived at San Lorenzo Nuovo where we picked up an apple and stopped at a bench overlooking Lago Bolsena. 

Rob is progressing with his language skills and trying out new things. Good to see his confidence growing. 

Lots of volcanoes around here. 

We passed through a forest that was blanketed with beautiful flowers.



And then we traversed the eastern slopes of the caldera above the lake for another nine or 10 km. 





This caldera is massive! It reflects the size of the huge explosion that happened here when the volcano collapsed. I understand that they still consider this volcano to be active. Even though it’s been dormant for a long time the new criteria used to measure this has recently been changed, making many extinct volcanos now considered active, geologically speaking of course. 😬

We arrived into Bolsena in time for a nice lunch. 

Salad is more satisfying after a stage than pizza or pasta which are pretty heavy. 

After a few challenges we managed to find our place which turned out to be basically a full house. We were not expecting that.

After the usual domestics we went out for a walk to see the old town which consists of an upper old town and a lower old town.

We are staying in here somewhere, the lower old town.





Not long now until Halloween.





We stopped at a fish shop where we picked up two nice size fish from Greece for dinner tonight. 

We walked down to the lakeside to check out the caldera.


Try We will be 
It was then time to go and find some vegetables and a good bottle of wine to wash dinner down with. Not too hard to do here!



We saw this great car today! The old fella driving it gave me a thumbs up.

Tomorrow is a short stage with lots of climbing as we walk along the southeast side of the lake and climb out of the crater. It should be a really nice stage and I have arranged for us to get into our accommodation by 1300, somewhat earlier than usual. Stay tuned and thanks for following along.