Tappa 9: after Patti Maybe it's the sound of the sea, perhaps a shallow, salty wind passing through the curtains of my hotel room - at least I sleep like a god. Perfect - relaxed, relaxing. No compromise, no minus, it's like I'm in heaven.
Cefalú - dream city!
For the first time this holiday, I experience a perfect night. Perfectly. Happy. Worry about the next stage, I'm not, I sleep just as the Archangel had personally watched my sleep. let
Breakfast on the terrace I taste, enjoy perfect coffee, warm croissants, fruit salad, sausage, cheese, Jam - that should be strengthened today actually happen only one thing: No more and no less than the perfect stage!
And I will - be right - at least in part. For after yesterday I was quite confessed Tour de France pros overtake, I will now follow in their footsteps. And that will be exciting.
And do hurt.
But let's start from scratch with ...
Located right behind me Cefalú first equal, an increase of superlatives. To thaw. Steep spirals up around the street with double-digit gradient to the Rocca, not 500 meters down, the stomach still full of breakfast goodies, and even a sturdy toil on the neck!
The wind blows fresh from the sea, easily accessible from the back, which pleased me, for every km / h, I get paid is to relieve my legs over time.
What I do not know yet: today, the slopes of which they tell in "Hell on Wheels" always get: Unforgiven, hard, almost epic.
I still follow the SS 113, the winds here on Sicily's northern coast along the breathtaking coast. It is sometimes shallow, sometimes harder uphill, then, depending on how much I've worked for the climb, and again more or less flux decline.
Sometimes more, sometimes less menacing march dark, damp rain clouds on the horizon, the army of thunder - I hope they will spare me today. And they will.
The wind pushes me so hard that even today form on the flat rates beyond the 40 km / h no problem. I like it, thanks for the back wind, I can turn up without having to over tighten.
left of me surged an incredible turquoise sea wild in the rocky coast. Spray foam over the black rocks, one has the feeling that the Mediterranean under a boil.
I often hold on, hold your breath and enjoy the view, which here is never boring: Sometimes it is the view of a break-neck Rocks, sometimes leaving a village, high up, and sometimes the remains of a fort here that may defy for centuries the floods.
I sweat so much that I envy the fish that I can see and when in the clear water, - how great must be the one in the sweaty, hot Radklamotten come and in this refreshing bath to dive?
But long I will not have time to dream myself into the sea: the steaming asphalt, and call today's milestone. Then I kick myself again ascended the short ascents, who look as though they ended up directly in the clouds.
Then I switch to the largest sprocket and rattling crank me with 10, up 12 km / h the rises before me the little waves on the other side during the brief, sometimes to give the 60-scratching runs a little rest and cooling.
Looking back, I look with pride to have done it already: There, over there, this little road that winds cut as idyllic as translucent, but sometimes so brutal in the rocks along the coast, since the all I have conquered, managed won!
No bathers on the beach. Hardly any cars on the road, not a soul on the road: Sicily, I heard the lonely Cervelo driver who here for the hot midday the East of Island is broken up to conquer.
Alone? Probably not, because if my head right into the interior turn him lift something, I know the reason for my calm km on the highway - the E 90, a brand new highway here in high altitudes to sometimes bizarre concrete stilts around the island and the mountains have driven Duch, receives all the traffic.
My rest.
My happiness.
And I also use the time to let my eyes wander to the interior of the island. I have read a lot about the mystical places, the small and sleepy village, the rest of the time decoupled town hiding in the numerous canyons and valleys of Sicily.
Corleone, the village of the "godfathers", Castelbuono, Santa Caterina Villarmosa. All places I would like to attend, but due to the tight schedule probably should move to another trip.
all I was fascinated by the insight into the island's interior.
Above all, the vast, dry river beds, which depart in the spring when the snow melts the hell needs to attract my eyes. They look like those from "Lord of the Rings," as in "Star Wars" - as if from somewhere, just do not like this, my earth.
remote, far away - as I am sometimes feel. A landscape like a mirror into the soul. It appears that as well as behind the palace of Jabba the Hutt are ...
are still several miles ahead of me, no cars for miles around, no people - yes, when I think, actually, no animals. Where the people go? What happened here?
Then I step in, accelerating - at least as good as it felt at 40 degrees is just - crank and turn up, fly around the curves and noise at the precipice and I feel like the king of the world.
peels back the territory that I will go through in 15, 20 minutes, from the damp mist of the waves, absorbs far behind me the same Salt vapor is already captured around the lake.
buzz In my carbon wheels, hot air flows through the helmet - what could be better?
Eventually I reach the first major town on my way: It's Santa Lucia at Capo d'Orlando. First, I drive through charming streets and jammed with parked sidewalks, a city that sleeps: It's siesta and the Sicilians do well to barricade themselves in their cool houses, behind closed blinds - the heat they let out, lock out the oppressive temperatures.
my part, I continue fighting through the city.
And then it comes - "Hell Tour", Tour de France cycling and all my best regards from Lichen nightmares: The following is the mother of all climbs, the "Buck you!" for the soap, my apocalypse.
The SS makes an abrupt 113 to the right and what there opens up before me, is nothing less than asphalt-terrorism: 22 percent slope promises me the sign, and I remember the 16 percent of my Hamburg Waseberg.
And I pray not even more time.
The first ramp I step up and think I do not really ticking: Breathless I click me out after only 200 meters. I have my lungs back complicated stuff in my chest, turn my Head look, shocked into the abyss they call this "street" and try to understand the incomprehensible: And here is to be a normal highway?
No wonder the cars, trucks, motorcycles, and are probably also horse and donkey carts highway high above my head.
countless curses felt, three hundred meters to about three liters of sweat quantity later save myself panting for the next hairpin bend after another gained Serpentine - and find that the road planners here in Capo d'Orlando no more and no less than the worst street in the world have built.
fights Then buzzing and torturing a moped in first gear behind me up the hill, the driver nods to me - I am in no movement capable, so I'm ready.
done And not even the half!
goes higher and higher up it - a look back reveals the level, I will conquer this with a red face, boiling blood and buttery soft calves in my legs circulating acid, the lactate me dripping from the ears - I do not know how my eyes look now.
So that is 22 percent gradient!
Unbelievable, unbelievable! I put myself in an S-curve - not even 50 meters long, brutal hard drive for it, as in the inside the curves of the gradient at the 90 should be enough - to the side and try to take a picture that could capture this brutality.
Twenty-two percent!
I take every driveway, every little country lane, each parking bay to pause for a breath of air - so incredibly steep is it that I wanted, instead of the 27mm "climbing pinion" of an out of this Pedelecs the moms of to shopping street in Altona, under my butt - everything except must continue up! All that connect not only more!
But it was of breathless curses nothing - here I must be over!
shit!
More and more, higher, harder still! This shitty increase here does not stop! Next to me is piling up on the mountain height of a man cactus flower, a real beauty, which me here not interested need to much I now every molecule of oxygen, too little of this precious gas, my hot lung from this corrosive, filter, hot air here.
few meters more, I think, only ten, nine, eight turns. No, not yet, but probably twenty - indefinitely would appear that this rally is here to infinity, the torture - let's face it people, 10, or even to 15 percent are still quite fun - but 22 ... please ... this is torture!
I thank God when I reach the top. No idea what I'm here. No idea how many meters of this goddamn rise was here long - I'm up, crawl on the gums, the last meters, and put my bike against a wall.
A sprayer has sprayed a crucifix on the wall - and truly, I can imagine that so many has been longed for his last rites.
I sit back and gather new strength - the view into the abyss that opens up on the other side of the mountain below me, takes my breath away: 22 percent - almost vertically downwards!
mercilessly, brutal this sight, a madness, how steep it is here, downhill: This serpentine look as fresh from a sports movie as a heroic epic of professional drivers, like one of those documentaries about sports heroes that we so admired, admired for their suffering; for their strength and their will.
envied her body, beads of sweat that drip in slow motion from dirty faces.
And now? Now I'm sitting here. Sweat was dripping from the nose also. My face - is, I also smeared the dirt road. My suffering, limitless. And yet, no slow motion. No pathos. No applause. Just me and the road.
And this road down there - which has it all inside!
So I almost throw myself headlong into the depths - in the truest sense of the word, for not facing it is also said with 22 percent maximum downhill. There are also flatter pieces, but one that is clear to me from the beginning: let's not running here!
Once I fix my brakes just a few seconds, speeds up my road bike - 40, 45, 50, 55 km / h and already I shoot, no brakes on the roaring turquoise, the foaming surges as some hundred meters below me.
I have never been sitting on my bike - it almost feels as I do a headstand. Me aware of the fact that only a small block to the front inevitably means the departure, I feel my way down with crazy 5-10 km / h on the mountain.
I am at sdurchgeschwitzt after the increase, as I come down.
And tremble like a leaf.
Also on the other side of the Cape Orlando the city is in sleep state. Since
me after the trip from hell just now is no longer to feel like cranks, I think at a little bistro just off the road.
I park my bike inside and order a coffee and two chocolate croissants. Part of the pastry will fall down when biting, so I'm trembling still.
turns out next to me as the little family of German descent, and so I use a little eye contact, ask the lady whether they know much about here.
"Yes, of course!" She says gently. Her little daughter looks at me with wide eyes.
"I want to Milazzo," I say, "this is worth it?"
you look at their (Italian) husband, who immediately distorts his face.
"Milazzo Näää, do not do that! There's only industry, just dirt and stuff. Nothing beautiful." Aha, okay, would always been a bissel too far.
"And what do you recommend then?"
"Well -! You stay here Here is a beautiful beach paradise is right here," she says, smiling.
Well, I object to thanking from - although I have done, but twenty, thirty kilometers I will soon have to make today. And so I say goodbye and decide to just keep my eyes open.
The break has done me very well - only it was too short, for only a few kilometers later, reports my bladder, so I at a gas station, a few hundred meters from the beach, again has to stop.
What a view! I imagine there to rent a small hut down now.
down there now just take off their clothes.
down there now to trudge through the hot, soft sand beach.
With my blonde in her arms.
'a round of swimming.
... and so on.
But hey, is not a request concert here, so so hitched - Goethe stromert still around here, too!
So I come myself slowly into a trance and come quickly in the round kick. The wind pushes steadily from behind, with consistently above 30 km / h I can thus make up stuff.
This reminds me again and again on this road, which is at a dizzying height, partly as a New York subway or the wild mouse from Berlin's Christmas market looking over me spanning broad valleys, is milled rigorously by mountains or - as now - wants to have some curves describes.
funny. And it was now cheaper than this fantastic Super Strada expand here?
Well, I should be right - I still come to me as the sole ruler of the asphalt.
And while I ponder still so on the sense and nonsense of the highway, I find myself at The summit again - swing somehow now the highway to lofty heights and when I glide - whipped by fierce cross-wind - a valley which cuts at least one hundred feet below a sharp V in the island.
Up here it blows like sleeve, and so do I have to focus almost shivering with cold, very pleased to stay the course.
And then a chapter from "Italy - as it lives."
I come to a piece of road, which is probably broken off after a heavy rainfall by a landslide. Here in Germany they would have an immediate full closure and an elaborate reconstruction and million-dollar gain of the section (so it does not happen again!) Causes.
here in Bella Italia? Well, tell it like so - need few warning cones.
e basta!
Undweigerlich I have to grin and think of the highway patrol on my second stage, to me, within sight of the signs, the highway has recommended as a cycle track. "But always go right!"
honor Mr. Carabinieri!
It will take one and a half hours that I cook up in the sun and the asphalt just press, before I decide again completely exhausted that I have reached my destination.
It's a nifty bay, as always, almost a pity to be accepted as a matter of course, a downright-Caribbean-sounding Mediterranean branded to a wild beach, a small promenade with empty seats to stay and this place is HOT right way as my dear friend from far Abi-hours: Patti.
But I think myself too early on purpose - because there is nothing on the beach Underneath. No hotel, no pension, nothing. Only a promenade and benches. According to Patti, that shows me a sign, it goes uphill. And how!
high above, straight carved into the hillside, they have found homes in the wild rock. A monastery and a castle to greet me and when I finally, truly crawling on the last gum, the city reach I decide to check in in the first-best hotel.
The owner is friendly and takes me into a spacious and pleasantly cool room. Only 45 € to sample the night with breakfast and there seems to be directly below the hotel restaurant, I accept quickly.
getting there! Finally!
I undress me and give me the way to the daily ritual of anointing showers, skin cream and the ass. (As I said - I am sorry but my level is still in the bathroom at home, so I anoint my face with his ass cream must, but that's not the termination).
After today's stage - again just over 100 miles long - I will allow myself something really big!
because hey, at least I have today vicious climbs beyond 20 percent mastered and survived. A strange feeling of restlessness I flows through the legs as I try to sit quietly once: But it's not working. The butt hurts.
And when I saw him myself in the mirror - Sprained strange - on closer inspection I can see what I determined the next few days will bring some fun: plain, clear and bright red in a very first-grade fire radiates the triangular imprint of my road bike Prologo saddle toward me. Like when I would have crushed a giant butterfly while sitting down.
Au cheek, I think, au backe ...!
I wipe my ass 
problems aside put me down to the restaurant, which turned out to be a second look as a mistake - the food comes from a kind of hot buffet, it's cold. So I will be all warmed up by a pimply youth in the microwave and I can dry get down macaroni casserole with lots of beer.
jealous I squint Fired up the mountain - the entrance sign had promised a hotel here with a star more ... but they probably would have put me there with the ambulance.
the afternoon and dusk, I spend a little walk through the narrow, hilly streets of the village, to me - although I can see hustle and bustle - so strangely decoupled from the rest of the world occurs.
What are all these people live here? What might be their day's work?
When Mr. Goethe I find no answers - because that has never come by Patti.
To close I am off the day, ointment, arrived in the hotel room, again with deep worry lines my butt and put myself to bed early as usual.
I fall asleep with the map of Italy in the mind's eye. And I am happy: tomorrow because I will then go around the Cape of Sicily and see within sight of the Italian mainland and the tip of the boot.
And somehow, I do not know why, makes me totally happy.
Section 9 - Cefalù, Patti
stage length: 107.90 km
gross travel time: 5 h 25 min journey time net: 3 h 38 min
section: 28.4 km / h .
And now is the height of summer. 
The Maglia Rosa - the pink jersey of Giro leader - I will earn it. Have a route planned, Venice, Catania, almost 1,300 kilometers. Here I will earn my spurs, my hot Ross will perform, experience tough legs, tease me in slopes and succumb to the thrill of speed in downhill. The Maglia Rosa 
1300 km so - by a country that is next to tourists catches, pizza and machismo so much more to offer: ancient civilization, Mediterranean joy of life and of course a kitchen that is full of freshness and handmade only pretending. So on 
