We’re done walking now, and only have to make it back home. Pavia is really a charming ancient university town, with the university formally founded in 1361. All of the streets are cobblestone, with many, many old and beautiful buildings to check out.

But not for us, this time. We finished later yesterday afternoon with 16 miles and high 80’s temperatures. After finding our place and cleaning up (and writing the blog), our goal was to find food!

Shouldn’t be a problem, right? Cue the major regional festival in town, please! Bring in an extra 25,000 people, okay?  Finding a restaurant proved daunting … but we nailed it!

We found a local restaurant away from the crowds, and feasted.

Bill ordered a seafood spaghetti and Diane ordered a mixed grilled seafood plate.  When my dish arrived, I thought perhaps I ordered a mushroom!  A little investigation was required.

On opening it up, there was my delicious seafood spagetti! And the crust? Wow! It was delicious and PERFECT for sopping up the remaining juice, after the spaghetti was gone. Another superb meal was had!

Odds and ends: We travel with some rudimentary backpacking cooking equipment, like a knife, spork and a very portable water heater.  About 4 days into the hike,  Bill’s precision crafted titaniun Spork got lost. Darn! Seriously, we use it every day because we buy yogurts for an extra “protein hit” in the mornings. Now, it’s lost!

Going to a local supermarket, they sell disposable forks. We bought one.

($10 spork in left, $0.10 disposable on right). Well, that disposable lasted 2.5 weeks, making us wonder if the fancy one is really needed anymore?

Luggage: When you carry everything on your back, flights should be easy, right? Everything is “carry-on”! Not so. Hiking poles

are/can be restricted to checked luggage. That means we need a suitcase to hold our poles (note that they fold, minimizing space needs). But, we can’t hand carry a suitcase for 250 -500 miles of hiking …

Options:  Often, we can ship the bag ahead to our final hiking stop and pick it up there; if there’s a shipping service and a storage service.  Or, buy a cheap suitcase, use it to go home, use it to return, then just discard it!  This year, we gave our old “cheap” suitcase to the clerk at our hotel in Switzerland, then started our walk.

On arriving here in Milan (fashion home to the world),  we went out looking for that iconic “statement”bag … for 20€ to carry our poles home!

Well, inflation struck! We found the immigrant vendor and negotiated our best price on this fashion statement bag. 25€.

That darned inflation!

As we review what equipment we had at our disposal, we ask,  “what was the most valuable thing we brought?” Given the miles and miles and miles walked along river paddies, the answer was clear

Enough said! See you stateside.