Day 17 - Homeward Bound

Our route out of Verona to the airport turned out to be surprisingly pleasant as we left the city behind after a couple of miles and were then back out onto country roads which eventually turned into farm tracks.

  Just about half a mile from where we  expected the airport to be, a farmer coming out of a field on his tractor and trailer tooted at us and called us over.  At this point I expected to be told there was no through road, or to be told in Italian to "get off my land".  However, with much chattering in Italian, he reached into his trailer and grabbed handfuls of peaches to give to us, he was trying to get us to fill our panniers with them.  Eventually we persuaded him that one each was enough and he seemed delighted when we told him we were from Scotland, I think he thought we had cycled the whole way.

This wee incident was an absolutely brilliant way to finish off the trip and really highlighted the different experiences you get travelling by bike.

Ten minutes later we were at the departures area of the airport where we got into our now fairly well practiced routine of packaging up the bikes and panniers.  When we went to put the bikes through outsize baggage they wouldn't fit properly on the conveyor belt.  This is pretty standard and has never been a problem at any other airports, however, they insisted we take the front wheels off to make them fit. This involved a fair bit of unwrapping and, unfortunately we had used up all our parcel tape and the only tape we could get to re-wrap them was Elastoplast from the pharmacy.

Anyway it seemed to work and the bikes and all our other luggage arrived off the carousel at Edinburgh.  Our flight gave us a spectacular last look at the Alps as it flew almost directly over the Eiger and Aletsh Glacier

Our final wee drama occurred as we were trying to exit the car park at Edinburgh Airport, I put my pre paid car park ticket in the machine expecting to be on our way, however the barrier stayed firmly in place and the machine proclaimed even more firmly "amount to pay £590.00" !!!  Fortunately a quick word over the intercom sorted things out.

It has been another great trip, we are now back home to catch up on the highlights of the Tour de France and to plan next year's trip.

Today's miles 6

Total miles 562. (I'll work out the amount of climbing over the next few days)