No soup for you!!

Day Three Ostuni to Gallipoli and Day Three of No Lunch for Nancy and Dayna. This one was my fault though. We were up early because we had to catch an 8:40 train from Ostuni to Lecce for the first leg of the trip with 33 miles of biking to follow. Some of the people on our tour have done other bike trips and said there is no way this is an intermediate trip - this is very advanced in terms of difficult directions and challenging terrain.

We coasted down hill through roundabouts to the train station and managed to properly validate tickets and negotiate our bikes to the right platform and get them on the train. At the train station in Lecce, Nancy noticed there was a post office so I decided to mail the painting that I bought the night before (a sea scene that I thought was going to fit in my rollie bag, but turned out it was too long). No problem right? 

I didn't see a place to take a number, though there was a big sign with strange symbols on it up on the wall, so I stood in line for a few minutes before a woman behind the desk pointed that I should go into a different room with my package. I went down the hall in a steamy little room with a closed sign on the door, but another woman came in to meet me. She handed me 6 different forms to fill out and indicated I should also write on the package where it was going. I sat down to fill everything out and while I was doing that, another man came in - he didn't have a package, but he was obviously doing some kind of business with the woman, they kept stamping and signing papers back and forth for awhile. I started thinking it was taking awhile and I should have bailed at this point, but I kept thinking I was just about done!! She evaluated and stamped and corrected my mounds of paperwork - weighing and measuring the package that, with my luck, will probably never even make it home!! Finally, after 45 minutes of processing, the package was accepted and we were back on our way. 

The road to Gallipoli was lots of small path with a few stretches on a busy road, but very flat, which means a lot of pedaling. Although the road to Ostuni had a lot of hills, it also had a lot of downhill coasting breaks. We also had full sun and lots of dust, so when we finally arrived in Nardó after a couple of wrong turns and backtracking, it was about 12:45 and we headed straight for the wine tasting place we wants to try.

We showed up without any advance notice and the woman working there seemed very surprised to have any tasters - she spoke virtually not English, but we communicated that we wants to try some wines after a little back and forth. She set out 3 local wines on the table and I went to sit down on the high bar stool type wicker chair provided, only to have it crumble into pieces as soon as I sat on it. Like not just a little break, like into three separate pieces. I fell into the woman and stopped on her 

foot - I'm pretty sure the €4 bottle of wine I bought was not really compensation for 

the havoc I caused.

As we left at 1:30 or so, we were in a shutters and closed up city, so we broke out the croissants, hard boiled eggs and apricot that Nancy thankfully grabbed from breakfast. We had a little picnic on the side of the road and kept pedaling toward the sea - Ionian this time. 

As we broke out of the desert to the water, I needed to stop for a beverage and we went to a little bar on the water filled with scantily clad, very tan, very thin Italians. We felt right at home. I ordered an iced tea and we played a couple of rounds of backgammon while the group drank and swam around us. One particular specimen has a two toned scraggly man bun and tiny lotus print speedos on with a large 

shoulder tattoo that said "I will fights to the end". Sigh.

We bikes along the ocean to Gallipoli, a little seaside town with the main centre across a bridge on a small island. We quickly changed, hoping to find some food, but everything was still closed up tight. After 5pm, we found a place, but they said they only had drinks, no food yet. I think they felt bad for us, because I was able to get a couple of pieces of pizza from the girl in the back. Heaven.

We wandered the little knick knack shops and watched the sun set over the water before we cleaned up for dinner. We tried several places that claimed to be all booked up for the night until we found one bustling place where I carefully asked for a table in Italian and they said no at first, but then got us in (I like to think my Italian helped!). The food was fantastic - we had an incredible fresh octopus salad cooked simply in olive oil and herbs, the best shrimp linguine of my life and I had a potato crusted fresh sea bream. A bottle of cold Negroamaro Rosato (rosé) was the perfect finish. My favorite meal so far.

We wandered back to the hotel through the crowded at midnight, narrow streets - everything is open!! Every shop is humming and midnight - children are out, babies are being pushed in strollers, it is prime time. We got to our hotel and decided to open the bottle of wine from our tasting debacle and took it up onto the roof of the hotel. We were alone and there was an amazing fresh breeze - we planned for our next day on the way to the tip of the heel of the boot of Italy!!