Everything comes between a coffee and a cappuccino, a morning like any other, while Claudio chats with customers of his small bar in the province of Venice. Daniel enters the bar and offers her crazy idea to his friend: arrive by bicycle to Copenhagen to promote the everyday use of the bicycle and to stop climate change.
Claudio takes this challenge immediately. For a long time the bike has become his preferred mode of transportation. He rides the bike every day to bring the children to school, to go to work and move in Marghera (Venice.)
Daniel deals with climate change as an environmental consultant and each year he was invited to the World Conference where experts come from all over the world. They move by airplane, analyze and discuss climate change, and when they returned home they write their report on how to consume less CO2 to save the planet. Daniele feels the need for a different experience, that really involves him, and that could communicate to the new generations, the need to embrace sustainable mobility.
Daniele Bonato and Claudi Pernigotti are traveling for a week, sleeping in hostels and friends who offer their hospitality. We meet them in Rovereto where they make a stop at the Greenhouse, the former tobacco factory turned into an incubator for start-ups, promoting green economy.
They arrive all sweaty, with water bottle in hand, and the desire to tell us their adventure.
The next steps will Bolzano and Monaco, but Claudio prefers not to dwell too much on the route, because when you are traveling by bike is better not to make too many plans and enjoy day-to-day experience (and possible unforeseen).
They tell us about their difficulties in finding the bike paths, especially at points of transition between a municipality and another. But also the pleasure of experiencing the journey by bike, a landscape behind the other, a small town after another.
When you travel by car is different, you get to your destination without understanding and knowing what there is in the middle, which is what gives meaning to their adventure by bicycle.
Their message is this: to stop climate change, is not enought to talk or study it, we must act. So they invite everyone to get the bicycle and ride with them. The message seems to work and a lot of bicycles have joined their adventure for a few miles or a long itinerary.
We expect that people decide to chose the cyclotourism, says Claudio, if we can do it ourselves (which we are not athletes), cycling is an activity affordable to everyone!
Info: Ride with Us, from the website you can follow in real time the route by bike
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