Biking in Finale Ligure…

Finale Ligure… A biking paradise… Situated at the ocean, Italian flair, Pizza, Pasta, Gelati – we all loved it there!!!!

Eight motivated bike-“freaks”, spread out in three different cars… Maik and his friend Marc already left early in the morning… Pia and me tried to leave at around 3 p.m. but due to the fact that I took both of my bikes with me, we had kind of a space problem 😉 3 bikes in my car, the camping matresses, the climbing gear, tent, etc… All fitted in my car, so it took a while 😉 Sabrina & Co left Innsbruck later, so we wanted to meet them in Finale…

7 hours later with a few stopps and a shock about the Italian gasoline prices, we finally arrived Finale… It was already dark and we had no clue where to find the Camping site ;-)… Maik tried to give us directions but no chance… Drove up there, back again, asked, but couldn’t find it, so we decided to stop in the woods to camp there…

It was a windy, spooky place with hardly any sleep… 😉

The next day, beautiful weather outside… Started early to find our Shuttle Service http://www.ezefreeride.com for the next two days… Finale is known as a biking and climbing paradise. In terms of biking, more than six different shuttle services offer guiding and transport… Usually you start at around 9 a.m. until around 6 p.m. with a lunch break inbetween. Costs for the shuttle service including guide: 40 Euros/per day. Trails are from super flowy to very technical… You find everything…

Finally we met all of our friends and started out with Enrico and Marco from Ezefreeride… The two guys have their own business (Ezefreeride) and also offer B&B Appartements for bikers… But we stayed at a different place… Actually at a climber’s campsite 😉

We had two AWESOME days of “shuttling”, had some great riding and a super motivated group with all great riders!!

Here’s  a video to give you an impression how it was…

Trailsurfing in Finale..

 

After two days of intense downhill biking it was time to pedal uphill by ourselves… We chose the area around Selva/Marie… Biking close to the ocean… What we didn’t know was that the 24hour Mountainbike Championships from Finale, http://www.24hfinale.com/24h/Percorso.it.html, was going on. So the trails we wanted to ride were not open for us 😦 It was a long day of waiting, cheering the bikers, finding other trails but at the end we found another cool trail to ride down and chill at the ocean…

The last day of our journey was like the weather forecast promised – wet… Nevertheless we went biking… Shuttled up to the Nato base, got dirty & had way to much fun 🙂

Finale – we’ll be back 🙂 Great times, great memories – thanks to Johannes, Mike, Sabrina, Damian, Lulu & Pia for such a cool trip!!!!!

Some more impressions…