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Long Way Up, Short Way Down

Here are some more pictures from my adventures on the trails of Finale Ligure.

This is my faithful steed in the square of Borgio Verezzi. Don't be fooled by the Wikipedia entry claiming elevation of only ten metres above sea level; that measurement must be from the railway station, down at the bottom of the hill. There is a lot more info on the Italian-language wikipedia page.

The actual town of Borgio is a medieval hilltop knot of houses, of a type that is popular all along this coast: far enough up to be out of easy reach for pirates or other attackers, with a confusing inside-outside architecture designed to disorient them if they did decide to invest their time in climbing all the way up here.

After a bit more climbing, we finally reach the church of San Martino, a full 271 metres from sea level, where I started pedalling. It's best to do this climb early in the day!

From here there are any number of trails across the top of the rocky spur known locally as the Caprazoppa ("the lame goat"). The most famous is the Bondi, named for a local hero who still operates a bike shop in the centre of Finalborgo. This, plus the more technical X-Men trail, make up the drop back down to sea level, just in time to hit the bakery for warm focaccia fresh from the oven.

The locals are sometimes bemused by MTB antics.

A Long-Expected Holiday

Well, I’m back in Finale Ligure. In contrast to last year, this time around we were fairly sure we’d be able to come out here. A year and a half of no travel, plus a pretty stressful end to the kids’ school year, meant that I was looking forward to the trip much more than normal.

The views are spectacular…

…but you earn them with some pretty brutal climbs. A few of those rock steps are fine to hop up, but pull after pull of them is something else. Of course they are much more fun to roll over coming downhill!

This year I was testing out a full-face helmet with removable chin guard. I didn’t need the chin guard’s protection (yet), although I did bonk a tree branch pretty hard with the top of my head — but a normal helmet would have been fine there too.

Top of the climb, ready to head down?

This was a nice flowing bit of trail, but the builders around here have a great love for switchbacks where there is exactly one correct line, and if you put a wheel wrong… well, if you’re lucky, there’s a tree to catch you, and if you’re not, it’s a looong way down!

My guide for Sunday, Martino (highly recommended, incidentally) was one of the local trail builders, though, and was able to show me the right line through some of the more technical areas.

Bikers’ repose. This is not the sort of scene most people have in mind when they think of Liguria! Pian delle Bosse is a proper Alpine-style mountain refuge, white with red shutters, the whole works — and on a summer’s day, the lawn is just covered with dusty mountain bikes while their tired riders refuel.

Buon appetito!

An Unexpected Holiday

Every year after the end of school we have the habit of travelling to Finale Ligure, where my father-in-law’s family is from, for a couple of weeks. This is a a couple of hours’ drive from home, so not too strenuous. In a normal year, SWMBO and I spend the weekends at the sea, and then drive to offices, airports, or train stations early on Monday morning, leaving the kids with her parents. We would then return to Finale on Friday, or if possible, on Thursday night so we could work from the beach on the Friday.

This year was a bit different. Once the Covid lockdowns hit in earnest, we had assumed we would not be able to travel to Liguria in June; the border with the region where we live had been closed to non-essential travel. However, in early June the restrictions lifted, and so we trekked out here.

This year is the first year I have spent the full fortnight in Finale, instead of disappearing during the working week. It has been somewhat challenging to work from here, but I figured it out, more or less — and one benefit is that I have been able to get up early, sneak in an early-morning bike ride, and be back with warm focaccia straight from the bakery for breakfast, all before 9am.

Finale is one of the top mountain-bike resorts in Europe, and stiff with ancient rusty camper vans from Germany and Scandinavia with bikes strapped to them that are worth several multiples of the van and all its contents. What is also great is the variety: you can be bombing downhill through a forest, then there’s a village that looks like something out of the Lord of the Rings where you can stop for coffee, then there’s a technical rock garden, and then at the end you can cool off in the Med. Pretty good, for an unexpected holiday.

That last picture is my office in Finale, yes. So if you’ve been on calls with me in the last fortnight, now you know why I’ve been using Zoom backgrounds more than normal…

The one downside is that the two episodes of the Roll For Enterprise podcast that I recorded down here have noticeably worse audio for my parts, because I was using AirPods instead of my fancy home studio setup. Something to bear in mind in future years, since we typically record on Friday afternoon at my end, when we would usually aim to be in Finale even if we had not spent the whole week here.