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Friday, September 6th - Venice to Udine - 10,711 km
The morning is cooler than yesterday, not foggy but with broken cloud. Part of the coolness is the wind, which is coming from the north. I share breakfast with Lee Ling and Jochen one last time. They are both concerned for me but not talking about it much. Lee Ling is not as up on her European politics as Jochen, but she has caught his concern.
The best thing is just to leave after a quick goodbye. I am back at the train station collecting my bicycle and loading on my bags. Next, I am on the Ponte della Liberte smelling the stench from the Veneto Lagoon and blowing flies away from my face. In Mestre, I turn to the east towards Udine. I have a headwind on the causeway but it becomes a crosswind after I turn.
For the first 15 km or so the road stays near the lagoon. I get whiffs of the stench of the algae in the water and the air is heavy with humidity. My route is ultra-flat. There is no scenery worth photographing. Between me and the Adriatic is mostly marsh and to my left mostly farmland. The road begins to pull away form the lagoon so the smell disappears, but I am surrounded by many smaller inland marshes around San Done di Piave. A few kilometres later, the marsh gives way to flat farmland near Ceggia.
I am blessed with an expressway that parallels my route and siphons off most of the serious traffic. With no reason to stop and a peaceful route I get into a meditative pattern of cycling, a quasi-trance state with an even cadence, allowing the scenery to unfold gradually around me without paying it much mind. It gives me a chance to worry about what I am doing, but I do my best to prevent that. Worries are usually unfounded, I reassure myself.
I stop for lunch in Portogruaro, the only sizable town between Venice and Udine. I rest for twenty minutes in the Piazza della Repubblica, which has a town hall that looks vaguely 
like the Alamo. Like every town in this area, including Udine itself, the guide book has nothing to recommend seeing. I am grateful that there are no reasons for tourists to be here. The expressway continues east on its way to Trieste, but I head north and then north-east on a more direct side roads to Udine. It is set back 40 km north from the Adriatic. There is another expressway that links Udine with this one, and even though that route is longer expressway traffic prefers expressways leaving my route quiet. I have more of a headwind now. The short bit of sunshine that emerged in Portogruaro is gone again and the cloud cover is thickening.
At 4 pm, I cross the Tagliamento River, which looks more like a long lake, and follow a straight, diagonal road that passes through Codroipo and Campoformido to
arrive in Udine around 6. The early September days are fading by this point. I look around the city but find no signs for a tourist office and no indication that there is one. Finally, an Italian city not worthy of tourism, but that leaves me searching for a reasonable hotel on my own. The local men are out cruising around and around in their cars, blaring music and trying to look hot in this go-nowhere town. Others stop to preen themselves in shop windows. Their relative good looks are compromised by their vanity. They walk around in small packs with their arms around each other expounding their prowess and checking out the packages of their competition. Andres taught me the German expression, “Is he really gay, or is he just Italian?”
By 6:45 the only options I have found are business hotels at the equivalent of $100/night. By now the light under the cloud cover is really fading. I cycle to the outskirts of the city and find an unkempt grassy field where the grass is high enough to hide my bike and sleeping bag. Since I have no tent, I will be sleeping in the open. I don’t want locals to know I am here, in the off-chance that someone might try to rob me in the night. I can’t go into town and leave my stuff lying in this field either, so I crawl into my sleeping bag. I read Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” (ironically) before the light has totally left the sky. Small flies, mosquitoes and ants pester me and keep me from sleeping for a while. I am woken sometime later in the blackness by a light rain shower. Thankfully it stops and I go back to sleep.PHOTO 1: Ceggia
PHOTO 2: Portoguaro
PHOTO 3: Portoguaro church
PHOTO 4: Udine Cathedral
PHOTO 5: Udine's Piazza de la Liberte
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