Two Wheeled Life Part 12

 Two Wheeled Life Part 12

We were happy with Piedmont Cycling Resort - we had fun, made money and had time to do other things like follow races ourselves or for Heather to escape to "hobknob with her fellow wizards" at academic conferences.

In 2018 she received a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Naples so we got another installment in our "Life in Italy" series though we were already sure enough about the idea we'd sold our house in Iowa, stored the few things we wanted to keep with a friend and "moved" to Italy near the end of 2018. We made a few trips to Sicily for her to work on the study abroad programs she was running for the college. 

We then moved up north again for the summer tour season with Heather making a few more trips to Sicily to look into some potential houses for us to buy. We'd leased a place for few winters on the tiny island of Ortigia, but the owner wouldn't sell to us so we needed to find another place to live. We bought one, dead-center in the photo above, just steps from the sea,

 We produced a few custom tours, one to Castellania, the last time we'd see our friend Piero who sadly passed away in July of that year. In fact I dropped some clients off at the Milan airport and raced back for Piero's funeral, getting there just-in-time.

We enjoyed some of our regular clients at Piedmont Cycling Resort in-between work on the house project and hoped all that would be done before the 2020 season so we could devote more time to cycling whileHeather also had a study abroad program in Sicily for the spring college semester. Students began arriving in January 2020...along with a pandemic - COVID-19.

The students were rushed back to Iowa, despite the outbreak being worse there than in Sicily and the study abroad program shut down..for good as it turned out.

Meanwhile, here in Italy there was a strict lockdown. The only cycling we could do for a few months was on rollers up on our terrace! Piedmont Cycling Resort was shuttered. Who knew how long this would last? The second phase of the lockdown at least let us go outside and ride our bicycles, but nobody was thinking of coming to Italy to ride, so the the entire season was a write-off. Same with 2021, though we did plenty of riding ourselves including a MTB tour of ETNA along with seeing some races and enjoying another edition of the GIOS Raduno.

We thought in 2022 we could reopen after enjoying plenty of our own adventures during the time Piedmont Cycling Resort was closed. Things (in Italy at least) seemed to be getting back to normal and when it was time to make arrangements and schedule for 2022, after some careful thought we decided to call time on CycleItalia's Piedmont Cycling Resort for good. The kind folks at the hotel let us keep some bikes and equipment there so it's easy to return each summer to enjoy riding the dolce colline (sweet hills) of Monferrato, though these days we do it on e-bikes.

We produced our first CycleItalia tour in 1999 and our last in 2019, having fun all the way. By this time we'd bought a house, I'd started taking Social Security benefits while Heather started private annuity payments along with emeritus status at the college. We didn't need the money and decided our guiding days were over - we'd ride, eat, sleep, repeat on our own!

The Two Wheeled Life continues....