Mineral Collecting on Peterson Mountain

A friend of my dad's runs an active amethyst mine at the top Peterson Mountain north of Reno. At times they allow people to contribute to the mine and in return they get to do a little collecting. This was one of those times. For some reason I completely forgot to take pictures of the actual crystals (we found some nice ones), but did pretty well collecting and had fun. Nice weather and great views.

Fattoria Degli Usignoli

These pics are of the first hotel we stayed in the couple days before and a couple during the ride. It was an agrotourismo located at the top of a small hill. Awesome location, great hotel, and very beautiful area. Agrotourismos are farms that have been converted to allow a hotel in order to help subsidize the farming. In this case the farm had vineyards, olive orchards, fig trees, and wild grapes all over the place. There are trails and roads that you can walk down to view all the farming and we made sure we ate figs and picked wild grapes that were growing in the trees. The restaurant was top quality and very good and the hotel rooms were very modern and very nice.

San Donato to Reggello - Day 1

I managed to forget my camera on the first ride of the tour. It was a warm up ride where 4 riders ended up going down in the first five minutes on the first turn. Very smooth pavement and very new bikes. You can see the picture of Ken's arm below. The other damage he sustained was beyond G-rating of this blog :). Anyway, here are the pics of dinner that night. The bottles are from the restaurant owners collection in the basement. He loves collecting old wine and liquor bottles. The sad thing is he's doing it just for the bottles so many are stored wrong or are going bad. Lots and lots of leaky bottles. Too bad. . .