Biking along the Po from Milano to Venezia was something that Scott and I dreamed about for about 15 years. The girls were old enough and it was our 25th wedding anniversary.
Biking from Milan to Venice: Many gifts
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Category Archives: Biking Italy
Milan to Venice Ride Stats
Here’s a summary of our whole ride from Milan to Venice. The GPX data on all of the rides, and a higher resolution map, are available here. We didn’t follow these routes exactly but it’s pretty close.
Milan, Pavia, Piacenza, Cremona, Casalmaggiore, Mantova, Ostiglia, Ferrara, Chioggia, Venice
Total distance for the routes is 323.6 miles (including ferries between Chioggia and Venice). However, with all of our minor route changes, Angie tells me that according to her GPS watch we actually rode about 361 miles!
Venice by Bike
Victory: getting our bikes from Lido to Venice. It turns out there is an unwritten rule that Venice water buses (shown below) do not carry bikes. This makes sense because 1) It is not allowed to ride a bike in Venice and 2) The water buses are always crowded. Bear in mind that we were taking two tandems into Venice, with a loaded trailer (!). Here was our techniqe: Run down to the dock and ask the captain “Due bike abordo?” in your best bad Italian. He says ok, but only for one stop (the first stop on Venice). Then you run back and get the family with two cute bambinis pushing the gigantic tandems and trailer. He freaks out a little, then says “This is a gift to you”. He was right.
A Venetian vaporetto, or water bus
Riding to Mantova
Biking along the Po River brings many surprises! The bridges that cross the Po River and its tributaries are few and far between. So when a bridge is out (“ponte interrotto”) and it’s not marked on the google maps then the more leisurely 30 miles turns into almost 50. Thanks to Scott for his excellent navigation in finding us a new route. You can see our route here.
Add some rain, lightning, wind and mud and this is really an adventure. But what really made my day was the beautiful bouquet of flowers the girls and Scott put on my pack plus the squash belly buttons we had at a trattoria the very small town of Bocca Bassa (maybe 4 streets at the most).
#slowtravelItaly #bikingItaly
Cremona
This is in front of the airbnb we stayed at in Cremona. The hosts were wonderful. Mama brought the girls a fresh baked pizza in the afternoon and Papa insisted we take on of his bunjee cords to keep the bike pack on tighter. We felt right at home. They used their iPad and we used our phones on google translator to communicate.
