Lago Trasimeno

well, today we passed through Passignano again, but, this time, on bicycles we borrowed from the hostel. Our passage through this little lake side town was not executed as planned, although it had definitely been an option when we embarked on our circumvention of the lake around noon. Our intention had been to cycle around the southern side of the lake for about 25km to Castiglione del Lago and take the ferry to Isola Maggiore and then another ferry to Passignano which would leave us a final leg of 5.5km to get back to the hostel. As fate would have it, however, someone in the park administration responsib le for the ferry operations had made a rule that no bicycles are allowed on the ferry. The rule might have made sense if there had been throngs of passenegers seeking passage to the island, but this afternoon, it was only Michele and I. So sorry. Speaking of sore...what was sore, were our butts. Whoever designed the bike seats we had must have had buns of steel, because only cheeks that hard could have remained impervious to the torture those seats inflicted on our unseasoned behinds. Michele got rather creative stuffing her sweater into her pants and even contemplated at one point, to our insane hilarity, raiding the bails of hay on the roadside fields to add to her stuffing. We laughed so hard when she told me that, that we both had tears running down our cheeks. I spent a lot of the time simply standing up on the pedals. Not the ideal way of pedalling, but it saved my butt from annihilation. So, rejected as potential passengers on the ferry from Castiglione, we had to decide whether to return by the way we had just come or to continue with our circumvention of the lake. A quick review of the map lead us to the conclusion that we more or less half way around the lake, so it was a pretty easy decision to complete the full circuit...another 25km of excrutiating torture from our bike seats. It turned out to be the right decision. although there was no more bike path, we had good paved roads which we shared with extremely courteous drivers. Amd more imprtanrtly, near the town of Tuoro sul Trasimeno, we were able to see the fileds and hillside where Hannibal crushed the Roman army lead by the deeply incompetant consul Flaminius in 217 B.C.
In the end, we arrived back at the hostel with sore butts but happy hearts that we had completed the circumvention otherwise unharmed.