This Is It: Benvenuta al freaking Sud

There's a movie in Italy called "Benvenuto al Sud" (Welcome to the South) that plays on the stereotypes between northern and southern italians. A man living in the North gets a job transfer to the deep South. Everyone in the North treats it like a death sentence; his family will not move with him, his friends say their farewells, the cops let him off from a speeding ticket in sympathy. To make a long story short, as soon as he gets to know his coworkers in the South he falls in love with the area and the people, but he keeps up the pretense with his wife that his life is terrible. The wife finally feels so bad that she comes to visit, and he has everyone in the small town put on a show of it being as terrible as he's described: he moves his things into a shack and says that's his house, people are shooting machine guns in the background, and everyone is generally running around like a maniac. She eventually finds out that it's a ruse and the town is actually wonderful. It's a hilarious movie; throw on some subtitles and watch it.

I came to the Southern tip of the Italian boot heel last week to work a trip in Puglia. The first day I got here I was asking myself why this trip even existed: the roads are tiny, lined on either side with unforgiving rock walls, our directions say obscure things like "turn right at the third telephone pole", the city streets are crowded and one-way, the men are always gawking and yelling, and don't get me started on potholes. I was overwhelmed and pretty pissed off with the area. I came home from my first day of driving and removed Puglia from my list of preferences for places I want to work.

These streets need an Einstein to figure them out

This is a two-way road our big vans drive on to support our cyclists...

However, as the week went on I began to fall in love with Puglia. First of all, the sea is stunning, and it is everywhere. The logistics for the trip are very challenging with tight roads and a million turns, but it started to feel like a fun scavenger hunt. Once I survived the situations I feared, I was no longer overwhelmed. I met a huge tractor coming at me on a road the size of a U.S. bike path surrounded on either side by stone walls. The farmer and I worked together to move some boulders and I backed my van up the most I could to the side of the road. He squeezed past with about an inch to spare on the side of my van. I closed my eyes and begged not to hear the scraping of my side panel. Silence. We did it! After that, I knew every time I met someone on those roads there would be some way out.

A scene from our bike course.

The color of the water is amazing.

The starting point of the ride.

Guests (and leaders) took a pre-ride dip in the sea. "Refreshing" was a good euphemism to describe the temp.

The end of our long-option coast-to-coast ride!

The wildflowers down here are also phenomenal. There are fields and fields of wild red poppies lighting up the landscape. I walked amongst them to try out the Wizard of Oz theory, but I still felt pretty alert. I can't blame anyone for wanting to take a nap there, though.