Day 4 – Friday 18 July

Civitella del Lago to Badiaccia

Campsite

Badiaccia Camping Village (http://www.badiaccia.com/)

Notes

From the Il Falcone camp site the road fell over the edge of the world before levelling out on the shore of Lago di Corbara. I joined a main road to Orvieto, where I found bread and a bank.

The river Paglia joins the Tiber south of Lago di Corbara and the railway line and autostrada follow the river north, but the main road goes way up into the hills on the east of the river. To the west there are small (probably traffic free) roads that are an option, but I didn’t take them. There is a cycle route (BL-1) shown on Open Street Map - Cycle (OSMcycle). It comes all the way from Rome and passes Florence before veering east into the Venito and going on to join up with routes into Germany. Following its various connecting routes you can get all the way to the Elbe and onto the North Sea Route. The problem is finding campsites, and they lead you off in different directions. For me, spending most nights on campsites is more enjoyable than hotels, although they are an important backup. You meet more people for a start.

Anyway, hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I puffed into the hills where I found a very good lunch for €25. The cycle route comes over to the west of the river and joins up with my road in the hills and eventually comes down to the river, but then it follows unmetalled tracks for quite a distance. I didn’t trust it and stuck to a fairly quiet road from Fabro Ficulli, through Chiusi until I turned east at Tre Berte towards Lago Trasimeno and the campsite at Badiaccia. I didn’t take any photographs at all this day but I have borrowed a shot from Google Street View that show the cycle track where I crossed it. On Saturday morning as I was leaving I took the one of the campsite restaurant.

Badiaccia Camping Village is on the shore of Lago Trasimeno and is what its name implies. It boasts many camping bungalows and plenty of space for caravans and motorhomes. Tent pitches are on bare earth with hardly any grass. The facilities are excellent, however. I was shown to a huge pitch and put my tent up in one corner of it next to a tree that served as a bicycle locking point. As I was checking in I chatted to a German girl from Berlin who was interested in my solar panel. Her bicycle rear panneir carrier had given up the ghost and she had managed to strap it together with duck tape sufficiently to allow her to get to Badiaccia, but from there she had booked herself and her bike on a cross-Europe express back to Berlin.

When I came back to my tent after having some supper I found that the pitch next to mine was now occupied by a German youth group. They were erecting four or five big bell tents, with the young people in the one nearest to me puzzling how to arrange their guy ropes around my tent. In the end I moved a few feet to one side to give them a bit more room and found another tree for my bicycle.