Austinbike42

Great report John! Made my day at work reliving all of the details of the trip. I agreed with your assessment of the bikes with disk brakes - very noisy and must be finicky too, remembering Bills stern warning that nobody start the decent from the hill top restaurant on Elba before having them inspected. That wouldn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling. Our Co-Motion had plain ole' caliper brakes, which worked flawlessly - never had a problem feeling like we needed more stopping power. Never had any rim overheating either, which we had been warned about. Seemed like Larry was always working on someone’s brakes after the daily rides.

You sure hit it right with the description of Rome airport; what a circus! We had one of the large soft sided ProBike cases, and it was a bit of a hassle. As we intend to do more traveling, I'll definitely go with a coupled tandem and two standard cases on the next bike purchase.

This was our first tandem tour, and it was a home run! Bill and the Santana group set a very high bar for our future trips to be measured by...

Austinbike42

[QUOTE=Hermes;5393507]Both Velodiva and I agreed this was our best vacation yet. We had perfect QUOTE]

This is a little late, but I want to chime in and say thanks Hermes; your pictures and descriptions were really great! Bill should hire you (how about a trip discount!?!) as group reporter/photographer to document any trip you go on! I remember desparately looking for information on what to expect from this tour, not having done one before; a report like your's would have been invaluable!

Velodiva

Nice recap! The cypress-lined Poet's Road entering Bolgheri was memorable.
Tandem pace line on Poet's Road from the stoker's perspective: