Europe, take 3, scene 2

Wild camping is what you do when the campground to which you just busted your tukes for 120km to get to is closed, it's dark, and you have an in-born tendency to say "[expletive deleted, but the word isn't flip or fudge (it's fuck)] it." At least this round of "selvaggio" camping was in a campground. Not to suggest that there was hot water, tepid water or any water at all. Or facilities, as the Victorians'd say if they'd thought of it. I'd been looking forward to a hot shower to wipe off the disgusting and because the town to which I'd arrived, Sondalo, is at 870m, and there was a chill in the pure mountain air. But I bundled up, cinched down the sleeping bag and had one of the toastiest, most humid nights of sleep in my life. And I've been to humid hell -- Indiana and (you read that right: and) Maui. But it was a great night of sleep. Until the weed-whacker guys came in their little 3-wheeled truck at 07:30 to start prepping the campground for opening. They left me alone, as these northern Italians seem to do with everything, and I made my lazy-ass way over to a little town called Edolo. Most of the passes in this part of the Alps are still closed, but one of the most challenging climbs in the world, the Mortirolo ("Mountain of the Martyr," as named in 774 in reference to a battle between the evil Lombards and the evil Franks; also, Lance (yup, that Lance) called it the toughest climb he'd ever done; he said that while hopped up on EPO and HGH and such; imagine what I, hopped up on bread, jam, an orange and "Brasil" juice (what the Italians call a tropical fruit juice medley; I don't know if the word also describes a certain style of depillitation) faced). And, as I mentioned above, it was closed. But I figured "what the fuck," I could hoof it in my tractionless, open-holed shoes if I had to. What's not to like about my plan? I even had food. Scraps of CostCo tortilla chips can be filling. Or so I found out at the summit when I consumed said chips without chewing. I found an open campground in that little town (the aforementioned Edolo). I was, literally, the only camper there. A hot hot long long shower, a thorough clothes wash and a night of reading Treasure Island (it came free with my e-reader program and, anyway, my oddly similar book on the medieval history of Europe'd expired). Today I rode up the Passo Gavia (site of more war, though of a less bloody result and which ended when the Swiss got pissed at the Austrians because Austrian missiles had to go over Swiss territory to get to their Italian supply-convoy targets), which was harder than I can possibly describe. And it was also closed. But I and plenty of other cyclists worked around that. Which, for me anyway, included scrambling up a slope to get around a work-crew, the agenda of whom did not include making way for a cyclist who shouldn't've been there anyway you cut it. Now I'm at a "campeggio" that has free wi-fi and hot water. The water costs a euro, though, so I did the poor-man's shower and called it buono. Tomorrow the Stelvio -- another closed pass --and one day closer to screaming out all of my frustrations, of which crappy Italian bread is tops on my list, at professional cyclists. Cheeow, as people keep saying to me here. When I sing the cat food commercial in reply, I get nothing....