The Fausto Coppi museum.

Just a couple of the massive banner/pictures in the small town of Castellania where Fausto Coppi lived. Look how small Ian is in the picture. There were probably 20-30 of these massive pictures in a tiny town.

Ian at the museum.

Had a great dinner date with Ashley.

Here's the tiny church just below the house where we were staying. The bell rang out each hour. I love the church bells here.

We stayed in the house at the very top of the little village, just below the small village church.
6-27-10 Sunday
Today was our typical “after travel down-time day”. Usually after our travel day we are pretty burned out and take and easy day to get situated, relax a little and recharge our batteries. But I can only handle so much of that. When we got in last night and met Graziella and she found out that I was a cyclist, she told me I’d have to go see the Fausto Coppi house and museum. For any non cyclist out there, Fausto Coppi was one of the greatest cyclists of all time. He’s certainly in the top 5 all time. He was pretty dominant in cycling both just before and after WWII. He was very photogenic and was kind of like a sports star, movie star, and rock star all rolled into one in Italy. In the afternoon, everyone else still wanted to just hang out, and after most of a day of relaxing I wanted to see something or do something, so I took Ian to go find the Fausto Coppi home with me. From several miles away you start seeing direction arrows and then you take the Fausto Coppi road. As you start entering the village there are these gigantic posters the size of homes all over the place of him racing. They all have lights in front of them that I assume illuminate them at night. There was a museum, as well has his house had been turned into a museum. I wish I could have read all the Italian, but it was still very interesting and cool. Even Ian thought it was pretty cool. As we were leaving the town, we found a Fausto Coppi memorial and it looked like some type of a race/memorial ride had just completed. There were several people with numbers still on their backs, a team car, and a lot of people eating snacks. When I got back I decided to take Ashley for a walk and we ended up going to the restaurant at the end of the little town where we are staying. It amazes me that they even have a restaurant, as the town is only about 20-40 homes, but it’s a small family run affair and Graziella recommended it to us, so we decided to try it. I was just thinking of trying something small like an appetizer and dessert, but as we didn’t speak very good Italian, and the waiter didn’t speak any English we ended up eating a pretty big full dinner. He asked us if we wanted antipasti (appetizer/s) and I said “si” so he brought it out, but it was more like a full meal for several people. There was this great cream cheese with jam on bread, ham, salami, small fried fish balls, potato salad, these pickled onions and pickled peppers, and a couple of other things. Then we had this homemade ravioli that was fantastic. I was stuffed by the time we walked home, but it was nice spending an evening with Ashley. Kindra and I have tried to spend some one-on-one time with each child and it’s been great.