Despite the technical problems with my chain and the resulting train journey to work on Monday, the rest of the week went to plan, to the extent that I have a “plan” in the first place for my cycle from Reading to Henley-on-Thames and back! It’s about 16 miles there and back so in a week when I do the journey five times, I clock up around 80 miles. That is the kind of distance I would be looking to cover in a day from Reading to Puglia which would equate to five hours of cycling a day. The route to Brindisi is 1,480 miles (avoiding main roads), but the route doesn’t exactly follow the Via Francigena route. That said, it is not that far off and 1,480 miles would equate to exactly 18 1/2 days at 80 miles per day…. so lets say three weeks with a couple of days off. More realistically a month with quite a few days off and days when I don’t do 80 miles or get lost etc…
Now this is interesting: getting the above information from my Google map – it is here: Puglia2010Route – I asked for the calculation to be made by “walking”. It gave me the following map and route:

Now, if you are a keen follower of this blog, you will remember way back in August 2008, I did suggest that a possible way to return from Puglia would be by ferry. And here is the route. I never looked into the ferry route in any detail last year but it looks as though it is entirely possible. Cross country to Salerno on the west coat of Italy, ferry to Olbia in Sardinia, ferry to Genova on the Italian Riviera, ferry to Barcelona in Spain, cross country to Bilbao in northern Spain, ferry to Portsmouth in southern England and then a relatively short cycle to Reading and home. Wow. I think my Puglia 2010 odyssey has just become a round trip. How feasible is this I wonder? The total ferry time is 2 days and 10 hours. I could even cycle from Brindisi to Salerno, across Spain and then from Portsmouth to Reading. The cycling there may add another 8-10 days, so in total, a return ferry journey would add about 10 – 14 days to the journey. The whole trip, from Reading to Puglia and back would be feasible in 6 weeks. I would simply have to set off more or less immediately after having finsihed work in summer 2010; the weekend of the 24th/25th July 2010. Let’s say Sunday 25th July 2010, a week earlier than I planned.