Sanny, Dave and Matt tackle the Veneto Trail to see if it is possible to have an overseas adventure without sending the credit card into meltdown.

WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY SANNY

I don’t know about you but every time I read a piece about some adventure of a lifetime in some far-off land penned by a sponsored rider or paid for by a tourist board, I can’t help but wonder exactly how much it cost. It’s easy to have a brilliant time riding your bike and waxing lyrical about the amazing food, fine wine and five-star accommodation when it’s on someone else’s dime. But for most of us, it’s about as far removed from reality as me going on a date with Julia Roberts. (Although if you happen to be reading this Julia, my favourite food is pizza…) Of course, you could always go for the Yorkshire-esque approach of bivvying every night, eating food out of a tin can and treating personal hygiene as an unnecessary complication. However, nothing says misery to me more than being covered in dirt and sweat, then crawling into a sopping wet sleeping bag before enduring a seemingly endless night of half sleep and midge bites. Even in retrospect from the comfort of your favourite chair and smoking jacket beside a roaring fire with a cup of cocoa in your hand, it’s never going to be an enjoyable experience.

Beware printed menus with photos.

No, the real art of travel comes from putting together an overseas adventure that doesn’t cost a fortune nor is an exercise in the art of suffering. With this in mind, so it was that ‘Dave the Bastard’, Matt from DeAnima Cicli and I decided that with a few days to spare, we would have a bash at a self-guided foreign trip that would have only two rules:

No 1 – It had to be fun. This was meant to be a holiday with riding at the heart of it. If we weren’t enjoying ourselves, it would be pointless.

No 2 – The cost should be no more than an equivalent trip in the UK.

Being half Italian and a fluent speaker of the lingo, Matt’s suggestion of Italy was a logical one. But where to go? After an extensive, some might say exhaustive, two and a bit minutes of internet research, I had found a short video for the Veneto Trail, a 550km, 10,000+ metre bikepacking adventure in the heart of the Dolomites. A quick email to the accommodating organiser of the annual ride yielded a GPX route. A plan was coming together that Hannibal Smith would positively love!

With five days pencilled in for riding, our daily average mileage seemed pretty reasonable. Or at least it did from the comfort of our armchairs. Now at this point, a sensible person would have pored over the route profile. Had we done so, we would have seen that most of the climbing came in the first three days. However, never ones to let common sense and experience spoil the fun, our approach was a bit more haphazard. Rule No 1 dictated that we required a comfy bed for the night and proper Italian home cooking. Minor details such as whether or not we could manage several thousand metres of climbing in a day, fully loaded up, never really came into the equation.