As with most bike tours, you don’t really get a completely full week. It’s typically 6 days/5 nights and both the first and last days are somewhat abbreviated to account for transfers. This final 6th day of riding was one such day.

There were at least 7 of us that decided to ride the last morning – plus Alessandro, one of the tour leads. The rest were just enjoying the last bit of down time. Unlike previous mornings the ride was to get started at 7:45 instead of the usual 9am so that probably had something to do with it too. We needed to be packed to hit the road by 10:45 and the bus was going to leave at 11am so we didn’t have a lot of time to ride plus get some breakfast, shower up and pay any last minute bills from the night before. So, it was a quick out and back of just over 10 miles.

We were treated again to spectacular weather that morning and it was just cool enough that it felt great to be on the bike. Our turn-around was in a sleepy little town named Mango. We all stopped in a little coffee place there before heading back. Total elapsed time of the ride, even with the coffee stop, was just over an hour. And if you check out the elevation data for the ride you can see it was a lot easier heading back to the hotel than going to Mango, so it was a fast return trip.

After the ride, only time for a quick breakfast, a shower, and last minute packing before we were all loaded up for the bus ride back to Turin.

Everybody on this trip seemed to get along pretty well and mix together well. That’s not always true on these kinds of tours. And even though 6 of the people all came together they didn’t just hang together, and that was cool. In Turin it was handshakes and a few hugs and then like that, we all scattered to the four winds. Below is a good photo of the group right before one of the dinners. You can see everyone is having a good time.

And one last photo below of the vineyard hillsides as seen from the Relais San Maurizio. Couldn’t get enough of the vistas in Piedmont.