Today’s ride was a really pleasant ride through the exceptionally flat road approaching Venice. We’d decided to enter Venice from the coastal side, which means we had less traffic to deal with and a perfect flat landscape. What a joy after the hills along the coast of Croatia.

We stopped in Jesolo for lunch and headed down to the beach. What a weird beach! We were confronted with a whole bunch of signs when we rolled up - don’t park bikes here, no bikes on the beach - no fun!

We parked our bike against a “Don’t park bikes here” sign and went and sat in a small piece of exposed sand that wasn’t covered by sun beds, umbrellas and other rubbish.

Tiger pouted our that if you tried to do that to a beach in Australia there would be an armed revolt - mobs with armed with buckets and spades would soon sort it out.

They may have a point about keeping bikes under control though - we saw hundreds of bikes after that.

Then we were hopping on a ferry to cross over to Lido, the “reef” that guards the lagoon of Venice. It was only a short hop, but the rain started as we were on the boat so we headed fo a gelateria as soon as we landed and waited for the weather to clear. Luckily, Le Tour was on, so we got to watch Simon Yates win a stage.

I got into a certain amount of troubleBfor leaving my nut bar in my cycling jersey in the wash. There are a few nuts to pick out of our cycle shorts now. Oops.