My New Chimerical Kit

On January 1st I was contacted and told that I had won a trip… a trip of a lifetime… on Facebook.  I was skeptical at first.  In fact, I was really skeptical.  But the company that I had won a trip from was Ciclismo Classico and I have been salivating over their trip catalog for years.  I wanted it to be true that I had won one of their bicycle trips… I wanted it to be true in the absolute worst way.

I am happy to report that it was in fact very true!

As part of a promotion to gain more fans for their facebook page (by the way, if you’re not a fan you should be) they were giving away a free trip to one lucky fan who joined before January 1st.  And that lucky winner just happened to be me!!!  I’ll spare you the details about how I got all paranoid and would only believe it was true until I confirmed everything after I placed a few phone calls to the company myself.  And since the trip that I won (one of their “More Miles for Less“) was an Intermediate trip and I’ve never done a week’s worth of bicycling in my life they told me that I could just have a credit to any trip I wanted to go on!!!

All that remained to be done was select a trip (the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do) and find someone to join me on this terrific adventure!  My mom and I decided that this would be a great way to have some getaway “girl” time so she and I decided to go together (and DH didn’t seem thrilled to spend his vacation on  bicycle 98% of the time).  And we originally selected the “Easy” rated trip: Venice to Bologna.  I say originally because even the best laid plans can go oft awry.

About a week and a half ago I got an email from Andrew at Ciclismo letting me know that as tragic as it may be, the trip we selected was likely (almost certainly) not going to be departing on the date that we selected.  I was crushed.  I had won this great trip, and the itinerary that we selected seemed more than perfect, and we were going to be leaving at the perfect time during the year… but now that was all foiled.  Andrew was very sympathetic to our plight and he offered us several suggestions:

• We could go on the same trip, but choose a different date, a little earlier in the year where there was better enrollment.
• We could go on another trip, but over the same dates that we had selected.
• We could choose from one of their other fantastic locations (i.e., not Italy).

He also mentioned that they would, of course, make our trip changes with no penalty to us… since, after all, it wasn’t our fault that more people didn’t sign up for the trip we had selected.

We decided that we didn’t want to go anywhere but Italy, so the last one was out.  Then we just had to decide whether we wanted to go to Venice in August or the first option, which was the Italian Alps & Sud Tyrol trip over the same dates that we had selected for our first trip.  After much agonizing and looking over the itineraries and the average climates of both regions for both times of the year, my mom and I decided that it might be a tad too warm for us in August.  So we settled on the Sud Tyrol trip.  Andrew was awesome in helping us switch all of our reservations over and he assured me that I wouldn’t be disappointed.

When I hung up, I felt reassured that I would have a good time, but I wasn’t convinced it was going to be my trip of a lifetime.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Andrew sent me the full itinerary of the Sud Tyrol trip, and after we decided to just go for it on that one, I started pouring through it… trying to find something on every day that I was going to be just blown away by.  There were definitely several days that I was excited about.  One day is spent hiking (a little break from the biking) and visiting Ötzi, the ice man at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology and part of the trip is spent on the Ciclopista del Sole.

But the real thing that really turned me around to loving and being excited about this trip was finding out that the that particular region of Italy is known for producing some very nice Gewürztraminer wines… my favorite white varietal!

Now I know that this is going to be the trip of a lifetime!!  I can’t tell you enough how excited I am that I’m finally going to get to be a part of a Ciclismo Experience!!

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