Day 2 - Accelerating is hard
Our systems are definitely still setting up I'd say as we gave ourselves another 30minute extension on the leaving time this morning, but thats okay, there's plenty of time to get to military levels of efficiency in the next days/weeks/months. All being said we left at 09:40 this morning but with good legs and high spirits and plenty of food in the bags from our Lidl hit yesterday evening the 120 (200km) planned miles; our necessary daily average in Europe, looked well in hand. Turns out shops are open in Italy on Sunday so we pretty immediately stopped at a Decathlon to buy a better pump and for some quick gear indexing. Then we hit Milan and its traffic lights. Long story short, the miles, despite a nice tailwind, were hard won today as the distance travelled slowly crawled up.
The other side of Milan, post bubble tea, was a different story though with some very pretty scenery and a brilliant bike path along a canal. Quite the opposite from my recent French canals, and most canals in general to be fair, this one had crystal clear water! Wild! We made some very good progress until I overheated and then got bitten by 5 mosquitos in a 20s stop, and so Emma gallantly suggested we stop for gelato (which had been on the cards all day). Good call.
It was extremely good gelato at local prices - I was obligated to have two 🤷♂️
As the rest of the daylight cruised by into a beautiful sunset, we hit up another Lidl then set up in a maize field to unload our haul and have a bottle shower. Pretty reasonable day in the end, except the 18 mosi bites 🥴! Feeling the legs more than we should we concluded that accelerating with panniers is hard!
Food spend today: 49 euros