We arrived Thursday just after lunchtime and navigated our way out of the airport complex fairly easily, and managed to locate Castelfusano and our campsite. The campsite was pretty empty so we managed to find a nice quiet spot. Supper was at the campsite restaurant - pizza and lambrusco.

Friday 23 April

Overly enthusiastic campsite birdlife saw us awake at 05h00, but we only dragged ourselves from the tent about 2 hours later.

We hit our first problem of the trip when I tried to pump up the bike tyres some more - the pump came apart in my hands. Several bodges involving zip-ties and superglue failed, so we needed to find a bike shop first-thing today. The most likely place for this, according the the campsite owner, was in Ostia Lido on the coast about 5km away. It took a while riding around Ostia asking various people, none of whom spoke english, if they knew of a bike shop. Eventually we did find quite a nice one (Cicli Petta) and we were off on our way with a shiny new pump with a built-in pressure gauge (very useful!)

We retraced our route from yesterday afternoon and went back past the airport and the small town of Fiumicino onto Via Aurelia which would take us north parallel to the coast. The road was pretty busy and not very pretty, but despite having no shoulder we still felt relatively safe as most traffic was very courteous when overtaking.

We arrived in Santa Marinella at about 15h00 and we located a hotel with beautiful sea-views for 75eur. 92km was about 25km more than planned because of the detour into Ostia, but the riding was all flat so it wasn't a problem. After showering, a little lunch and a short snooze we headed into town. Nothing much to report here, Santa Marinella is basically a seaside resort kind of town with nothing much of historical interest. And being out of season it was relatively quiet too.

We found a cosy pizzeria hidden in a quiet (well, the whole place was quiet, but this part was very quiet) part of town where they served Napoli-style pizzas (with a thicker crust). Our waiter spoke very good english as he'd worked in the Italian ski resorts for years - a very interesting character.