Today was 10 miles and 400′ of climb. Totals are now 228 miles and 24,400′ of climbing.

Last night’s evening preparations included a most necessary Gelato splurge (triple scoop!). We’ll take photos … next time.

All days in Lombardi begin with an obligatory river crossing

And endless rice fields …

Another feature of this section is that about 30% of the trail is on paved Italian backroads.

The challenge is that this is Italy! Drivers will do 50, 60 or more on these narrow backroads! The good news is that they are usually very careful and pull over as much as they can to accommodate us (we also step off the road when they are close to us). If you look carefully at the photo, you’ll see a car coming and already they’ve begun to move over.  Grazie!

Something else we’ve noted is the farming of trees, likely for paper. Very large fields will have 100’s of trees all perfectly spaced and manicured. The photo below  shows some bad news for one field. Note that about 1/2 of the trees are fallen over.

At first, we thought it was man-caused. Maybe that’s how the farmer harvests. However, when we got into town we saw a couple other trees in front yards fallen over in a similar fashion. Our working theory now is that it was a big wind/rain event. We’re glad we weren’t out hiking then!

It’s starting to get warm out here again. We snapped a photo of a few fellow peregrinos enjoying some shade …

Nipper Encore: Dalai Lama was quoted as saying, “if you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito”. Well, last night that adage was proven right! One or two nippers were loose in our room and worked a regular schedule of buzzing our ears. Bill would dive under the sheets until it was too warm … and he didn’t hear them anymore. Moments after coming out, the nippers were back! Yep, “small” can make a difference!

Caio!