Day 22 - Berceto to Montelungo - Monday July 6, 2015

We had a really lovely homemade meal for supper at our B&B casa dei nonnie, last night. Gnocci with tomatoes and basil, followed by a plate of the famous Parma salumi and a plate of zucchini with a topping of parmesan cheese, another Parma cheese, breadcrumbs and minced ham all baked in a hot oven (absolutely delicious) followed by a fresh fruit cocktail, accompanied by a local Parma frizzante red wine. There was no menu or choice of you wanted for dinner offered, but the meal was wonderful.

Kristine will be proud of me, this was my second vegetarian day in a row – we had salad and a tomatoe/black olive pizza for supper last night and I didn’t eat any of the salumi today because I don’t like that sort of cold cuts.

The room was reasonably cool in spite of no air conditioning because it was a stone house. Unfortunately, as mentioned, it was a major party day in Berceto, and the party went on in the street below until 2am.

At around 1am I asked Russell to close the balcony door, and he said ‘we’re going to die’, but I said we would not sleep all night otherwise, so he did. At 2am he re-opened the balcony door, because the noise had finally ended.

So after another night with little sleep, we were up and down to breakfast when it opened at 7:30am. Lovely breakfast, said our good-byes, and then stopped at several stores to get water for the walk and supplies for our lunch. The service at the stores was very slow. No one was moving very fast.

We finally started walking out of town at 8:40am. In the first 2.5km we climbed 70 meters and in the next 4km we climbed 225 meters. We were primarily on trails in the woods and the deer/horse flies/wasps were the worst ever. I finally broke down at slathered myself with muskol, and didn’t have a problem for the rest of the day! Hurray. The main problem up to now was that rather using my poles to help climb the hills, I was flailing the straps around my head to keep away the flies/wasps. I wasn’t very popular once I put on the bug repellent and they basically left me alone. Hallelujah.

We got off track with the route notes climbing Monte Valoir at around km 5.18. It was another mixed up left/right direction, I think.  Instead of climbing to the top of the mountain, at 1167meters, we only got to 1101 meters. We missed what sounded like some interesting political/religious sites, and the ridge of the mountain, but the way we went, we saw a herd of mares with their colts, which was possibly even more exciting.

We got back on the route notes at the Cisa Pass at 11:30am, where we stopped at a bar and bought a Gatorade to go with the pizza we had picked up in Berceto. We visited the church at the pass, and then passed through via Francigena portal into Tuscany. Tuscany

Tuscany was everything I had come to expect. Absolutely beautiful forest, surrounded by mountains, cool breeze, much fewer bugs! It was a lovely walk through the woods. Still lots of climbing, but very pleasant.

According to the GPS, it looked like we were going to have to walk along the SS62 into Montelungo. Our route notes had some very complicated, detailed, instructions on avoiding walking along the highway. We set out following these instructions but very quickly ended up on the edge of a cliff with nowhere to go! We retraced our steps, which involved the steepest, highest climb of the day, at the hottest part of the 34 degrees day, and we then walked 3km along the SS62 to get to our hotel.

When we turned around the GPS was showing about 1km to the town, but after we passed the town sign we walked another good 2km to get to anything. The other interesting thing is that we could see the spot where we were trying to avoid the highway coming into Montelungo, and there was a major valley in between, with fences, rivers, cliffs, and a very large bridge. It didn’t look obvious how that would have ever worked!

Our route notes had said that the via Francigena today went to Pontremoli, but they had broken up the very strenuous day into two. We were thinking that perhaps Montelungo was far off the via Francigena, and we would need to back track quite a bit tomorrow, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

In the end, we walked 16.2km and climbed 755 meters. If we had continued to Pontremoli, we would have had another 16km to go, starting at 2:30pm.

Our hotel today is very rustic. 

Another old stone building. The man said we have the most ancient (knights) room. It is probably the farthest room from the entrance, up two flights of well-worn marble stairs, and poor Russell had to carry up our bags to the room himself (doesn’t happen often).