Levanto, Italy - Tour of Italy

It was around 12:30 pm when Heather and I found ourselves in Levanto, Italy on our way to the 5 Terre's. Suddenly we came to a roadblock and a policewoman was turning all the cars around. She explained that the road would reopen at 5:30 PM, but we couldn't quite catch the reason for this inconvenience. She explained our options which were to park and take the train into to Vernazza, or wait until the road reopened to continue the hour or so journey.

As you may know from experience Heather doesn't always enjoy these sudden bumps in her well thought out plans (to be fair I'm not the most flexible either). So after waking up at 6:30 am to try and arrive with a full afternoon at our destination we were basically stuck without a plan. 

As title of the post implies the road was indeed closed for a very valid reason -- the Giro d'Italia (Tour of Italy) was rolling through town. It took Heather and I a while to figure out that it was a bike race, but we were quite impressed that the world's best teams were there competing. Among the competitors was Team Columbia, which as you know is sponsored by my company and was fun to see in person. 

After spending some watching the racers whizz by we walked further to discover the excellent beach in Levanto. We ended up spending about 2 hours reading and relaxing at the beach, which was our plan for the weekend anyways. 

The experience proved that it is possible to make the most of the situation when you are stuck traveling. Granted it's pretty easy to do when there is a nice beach and one of Europe's biggest bike races at your disposal, but I'm hoping that both of us will remember it for the future. 

Best regards,

Scott & Heather Bulloch

The official race poster... note the color? The winner gets the pink jersey (vs. the yellow)

Go Team Columbia!

Levanto Beach!

My good looking wife, enjoying Sunset magazine!