Fun day, difficult weather, and beautiful but difficult ride at the Ciclotour de Mugello.

I am a day late, but I was exhausted last night after getting up at 4 am, a long ride, a party for Father's day at Kate's, then preparing for a tour for Dominick that I took out today, which I will blog about tomorrow.  Anyway, here is a post for yesterday.  I am going to let the pictures, with more description than normal, tell most of the story.  Basically, it turned into a super fun ride, on one of the best organized events I have done here.  Kudos to the people involved, even if the turn out was quite low because of some really rotten weather at the start.  Great ride, great day, and still fun to be here and participating in these types of events.

Ciclotour de Mugello - 2 big passes, rain, and lots of fun. by ridingwithcosimo at Garmin Connect - Details

We started with 8 from the team at our meeting spot.  One dropped even before we drove to the Mugello, as it was raining lightly in Florence at 6 am, our meeting time.  Here are 6 of us after doing our circuit through the autodromo Mugello, a famous race track for motorsports.  It was really fun to ride the whole track, which was around 8 kilometers.  After this picture, another 4 dropped out, as it was raining pretty hard, leaving 3 of us for the Medio course.

The event was really well organized.  This picture is of one of 3 ristoros in Firenzuola.  A beautiful little town, and here we had lots of great energy food and drink to choose from.  With the weather, the turn out was quite low, so the volunteers outnumbered the riders here by 2 to 1.  

Another ristoro at a tiny badia in the countryside on a really nice, but difficult, route from Firenzuola to the main road to Passo Giogo, which we hooked up with around 3/4 the way up.  Tiny roads, beautiful scenery, and helpful happy volunteers made it nice.

After the little ristoro, we had a fair amount more of the tiny backroad with beautiful scenery.  Here are David and Paolo ahead of me, just after the stop.  The rain stopped after about one hour, but it stayed cool and very cloudy.  Fog at the top of the first big pass, Passo della Futa.

My bike with the rain shell waiting for me to put on at the top of the last climb, the Passo dei Giogo.  David and i had around 5 minutes to wait for Paolo, which allowed for time for the photo.  

Here are the three of us, with my bike in the foreground at the finish.  We had a local person take the photo, and he took one, then said, the "Willier" must be in the photo also, then took this one.  The Italians take their bikes, in particular ones made in Italy, seriously.