Grand Tour Rest days are always fleetingly beautiful things. I can't imagine what it must be like for the riders themselves who I would imagine as stage 7, 8, 9 have to be dealt with, they start to almost fantasize about a day without the rigors of having to race and what that might mean.

But no sooner are they there than they're gone

and in a micro kind of a way for those of us who work on the race

hard and long hours it's it's the same dynamic isn't't it? We yearn for them.

And quite often they're because of the random nature of where the race is when the rest day happens,

where it's got to resume the next day and the slightly scatter gun approach to kind of finding

accommodation which is a mammoth task.

You can end up having quite unsatisfactory experience. That wasn't the case yesterday for Matt and for the team we work with and me.

We woke up and spent the morning in this little outskirts, little suburb of Naples that was fine, but it's quite urban and then, if you listen to the rest day podcast you will realize we ended up somewhere really quite special in the foothills of this Masif in Campagna to the north of Naples into which the race comes today for its uphill finish,

through the village of Kassano Mutri, up the Boca de la Selva climb.

And it's, yeah, it's hard to put into words quite how lovely and peaceful a day this is on

about half an hour we have to jump in the car and drive on to get to the race finish.

But the actual Giro itself has just melted away.

Because of the remote place,

nature of the place we're staying.

No other teams who are around here,

none of the other hundreds of people who work on the Giro.

There's no noise from the Girot alia,ale there's no branding there's none of the kind of

none of that vibe that will be there waiting for us just up the road when we do get to the

finish but we've stepped away stepped away into away into this countryside where there are vineyards, where there are just meadows put out to, you know, that have gone to seed that are packed with wildflowers,

poppies, all sorts of wildflowers that I can't possibly put a name to.

Huge oak trees, a canopy of oak trees,

...