Bike Trip day 6: Floating Piers

Friday June 24

Some things are worth getting up early. In this case "early" was 4:30am, to allow us to load our luggage into the van and drive out of Torbole by 5. Lake Iseo, about a 90-minute drive west of Lake Garda, is the site of an installation by the artist Christo. If you don't already know about the Running Fence in Sonoma county or the Gates in NYC's Central Park (to mention only two of his many works), you have something fun to look up: http://christojeanneclaude.net/mobile/artworks/realized-projects

The Floating Piers are Christo's latest; see 

http://christojeanneclaude.net/mobile/projects?p=the-floating-piers#.V3KsK5BXerU. It's three kilometers of cloth-covered walkway across the lake, connecting two islands to the mainland. It opened on June 18, and Your Happy Correspondent is one of the many (hundreds of?) thousands of people who will have walked on the water by the time the installation closes on July 3.

The start/end point of Sulzano is a mass of parking lots, shuttle buses, bicyclists, and huge herds of people, all cheerful and well-behaved, as far as we could tell. We got to our first parking lot before 7am, but its shuttle wasn't due for maybe an hour and we decided to try going closer. The second lot we tried was already full, but the third had lots of space and we had only a short walk to the shuttle stop. Because we had good reconnaissance and started so early, we didn't have any excruciating waits, and we were on the water shortly after 8. We had the good judgment to walk less than the full route -- a good idea, as it was already very bright and hot by 10am. It was Really Fun. 

The start:

Toward the island of Monte Isola:

A mood shot:

This view made Dan think of The Seventh Seal. (Those ants are people.)

And a final shot to give you another sense of the scale:

And really finally, here are my feet:

As I said earlier, this wasn't just a "bike" trip.