Let’s Chat (GPT)

Always happy to be back on the road again. 

For past trips, Dennis has spent many hours planning our route, investigating cities of interest, researching accommodations and discovering the safest and most beautiful bike routes. This year he decided to rely on his faithful personal assistant, ChatGPT. It’s an iterative process. He starts out by showing it an image of a proposed trip and asks something like: “We want to travel about 40 miles a day with rolling hills. We like to stay in the historic parts of cities but without too many tourists. We like authentic accommodations, especially ones with excellent restaurants. The roads need to be safe for bikes. Plan a route for us.”  And amazingly, a trip appears! It’s not super accurate at first, so he continues to revise his queries until the trip gradually emerges. But beware! It’s always positive - even horrible cities will get a description like “it’s a very nice city with a long tradition in iron manufacturing” which translates to an industrial wasteland. But once you learn to interpret the data and refine your inqueries, it’s an incredibly powerful trip planning tool. 

We were the only tourists (thanks to Chat GPT) in a town of about 2,000 people and happened to be there on their annual Saint’s day festival. We felt so welcome and throughly enjoyed watching all the generations interact.  The DJ, the pulsing music, the excited, growing din all portended an amazing culminating event. To our amazement, it turned out to be a giant Bingo tournament!  Everyone pulled out their cards and tiny pencils and diligently marked their numbers. We didn’t play, but I did learn my Italian numbers 1-100.

Another city we visited, Benevento, is known for their history of witches. They’ve been persecuted for centuries by the church, but the people still love them. As luck would have it, we arrived the night of their annual witch festival. Concerts, fortune tellers, and general witch mayhem ensued. My favorite line of the night was that the southern Italian women were responsible for unifying Italy because they preferred the blond men of the north. Seems that the witches are a cunning way for the women to counterbalance the typically macho Italian society. 

 The Lowly Fig, An Epic(urian) Tale

These past 3 weeks, we’ve ridden mostly on agrarian roads. Grapes and olives dominate the landscape, but figs are a close third. They’re featured on all menus, whether with prosciutto or pasta or stuffed in a croissant. Little did I know this ubiquitous fruit was responsible for starting a war that killed thousands, destroyed the ancient city of Carthage and greatly increased the size of the Roman Empire. It all started when Cato, a renowned Roman general and senator, strode to the center of the floor and threw down a basket of delicious figs - from Carthage. He was making two points - that the figs were so fresh that it showed how close Carthage was to Rome. And that they were so beautiful that they remained a powerful and economically vibrant threat to Rome. So off they charged to the 3rd Punic War and destroyed Carthage. All because of the fig.

Modern day sheep herding. The dogs weren’t quite sure what to do with us so they just kept us moving along.

Water buffalo. I never believed that Mozzarella cheese really came from Búfalo milk! 

Window series 

Just your basic ancient Roman ruins in the middle of the neighborhood

Beautiful view - of clean clothes 

Another beautiful morning, let’s pack up and go

Windmills on the horizon portend windy days on the bike.

Not all days are memorable, at least in a good way. This was 60 hot miles of horrible headwinds and repetitive scenery. Thank goodness we brought food and extra water as there were no towns for a 40 mile stretch. You need these days to appreciate the other days. Even then it’s a stretch!

 

One downside of planning on the fly is arriving at a city that has no open restaurants. Fortunately we’ve been mostly staying in these small apartments, which is somewhat like camping if you need to cook. We found a tiny market, and made a simple pasta dish. The bottle of wine cost 2.25€. We watched The Bear on my phone and had a really nice evening!

All the Airbnb sites are now available on Booking.com without the cleaning and service fees. Why limit yourself to a hotel room when you can enjoy an apartment for the same price? 

Matera is one of the oldest cities in the world and is a relatively new UNESCO world heritage site.  Caves,  history, the drama of the forcible relocation of its populace…well worth the visit.

A formation carved into a church - “time flies” (wings on an hourglass) admonishing people to repent before they die. No time like the present!

And finally - we made it to the coast. Trento to Tarento, about 800 miles. 

See you in Sicily!