Walking Across Italy

Today was supposed to be a 12.5 mile hike up the mountain, but due to a slight diversion (we never use the word “lost”), today’s hike turned out to be more like 16.5 miles. My Fitbit tells me that I took 34,400 steps, climbed 238 flights of stairs, and burned 4,300 calories.

It was a cloudy morning, so we prepared by bringing our rain gear and long pants. Before leaving, we had a hearty breakfast at our hotel and said “goodbye” to another hiker from Zurich. His name was John Jacomo, and he is on the same route as we are, but a day ahead of us. He’s also a lot faster.

Our taxi driver took us to a small deli in Camerino where we bought some paninis for lunch. (This is getting to be a daily routine.)

As we hiked up to the old town, we noticed that the fog was dense and somewhat obscured the scenery. However, we passed a church and went inside to light a few candles.

We continued to walk in the clouds for most of the morning. And while the air was damp, it made for a refreshing hike. About an hour later, we came upon an old Carpuchin monastery. We walked up the hill to see the sights and met the local monk who showed us the chapel and museum.

The monk told us that since there were no rare element nearby, the monks did their woodworking with local materials made to look like expensive ivory or silver.

We climbed further into the clouds and stopped by the side of a dirt road for lunch. We were uncommonly quiet during lunch as we were all a bit exhausted from the climb.

After lunch, the dirt road quickly ended and we found ourselves walking on a slippery farm track in the middle of a field. Although we questioned our leader about the validity of this trail, he insisted that we were just taking an “alternate route” down the hill. The farm track ended at a driveway where two of the owners came out to meet us. They turned out to be a lovely German lady and her adult daughter. We stopped to talk to them and take a picture. They obviously didn’t get many visitors on this mountaintop.

When we told them where we were going, they pointed to a gap between two mountains off in the distance. JP stated that he was anxious to get to the “cleavage”, and the rest of us just groaned! Luckily our German friends didn’t hear him.

It took us a couple of hours to reach the gap, but somewhere along that leg we passed our 100 km point. (That’s about 25% of our coast to coast journey.) To celebrate, we took a commemorative photo with my new iPhone. The problem was that it took us 10 minutes to figure out how to have the camera take a delayed photo. (What do you expect from 4 old guys?)

We finally made it through the mountain gap and arrived at the hotel about 4:30 pm, seven and a half hours after we departed.

To celebrate our successful adventure in the clouds we dined on pasta bolognese, potatoes, spinach, and a rosemary infused steak.

Tomorrow we leave the province of Marche and head into Umbria.