Twelfth and penultimate stage of our journey. Wake up at dawn, but surely many of you woke up before me, so nothing heroic this season. After a fruitless attempt to find money from the machine down at the port, I pay with the ATM normally, this morning it worked, who knows why? I set the navigation on alternative routes, as I saw tunnels on the highway and I know that Cri fears them.
We turn around Selinunte in search of the passage marked on the track. The track passes through a private property, protected from the dogs wandering in the middle of the gate. We stop a native who tells us that everything is open as there is no longer anyone on vacation and therefore the gates are open. We take the descent, we pass through the first gate with caution, the dogs remain still, fortunately! We pass the second gate and we are out.
We take the old provincial road 56 which passes lower than the state road, very rare cars pass by. The landscape is so rural that at the turn of a curve we are in the queue of a flock of sheep. There aren’t many, I think 200. They occupy the entire street. Cri begins to grumble: “But don’t you want to overcome them? I hope! " But the shepherd sees us, shouts a sharp command. The sheep all move to the right, taking up less than half the roadway. They hug each other so tightly that they seem to flatten out. We pass, no sheep get upset or frightened, they stay on the side without losing their position. When we finish passing them and greeted the shepherd as well, he issues another command and immediately the sheep return to occupy the entire road.
We continue for many kilometers towards Sciacca, with continuous ups and downs. We are in the territory of Menfi. We skirt rows of eucalyptus trees, farms planted with vines and others with olives or citrus fruits. The road is of superb beauty, miles of absolute cleanliness, no garbage dumps along the way, no litter, bottle or anything else.
At the crossroads for Porto Palo we see a cycle path, but we don’t understand where it can lead. After a few kilometers, we find the track again, and we see that it descends towards the sea where we are going. We take it, in spite of the Gps track and the maps, both free and paid, which do not report it. Superb, paved, with wooden palisade. The ruined toll booth makes us understand that it is an old disused railway Castelvetrano - Agrigento. On the left of the buildings, eco-monsters type, a few finished, others only at the level of skeletons. We arrive at the sea. A very long sandy beach with a camper and a car. It is the white Giache beach. The seat of the asphalted railway ends, and continues to be paved along an avenue of eucalyptus. It continues for about a kilometer, occasionally the tracks emerge. It ends where the sleepers also reappear but also many impassable shrubs. Here we meet two gentlemen from Stuttgart who are also touring Sicily, but by ebike. I show my perfect Oxford English 
. They leave and after the solution of a small male and female technical problem, we find them close to a gate that blocks the road and prevents entering the provincial road. We help each other by passing the bags and bikes next to the gate and we take the road again, which being uphill, means that after a few minutes the two Germans are no longer reachable by us.
We pass San Marco without finding any restaurant or supermarket. It is a very difficult period for tourism, everything is now closed. Hunger is felt and the water runs out. We have to wait to enter Sciacca to find a shop. We stop, water, bread and fruit. We refresh ourselves and resume the search for an ATM too. We are at the port and we see that all the ATMs are in the center, the only problem is the climb. Garmin scores 15%, we go down and push the only stretch, a few tens of meters, in which we pushed. Cri stops on a balcony overlooking the sea and rests, I continue the climb on foot through the streets of Sciacca.
In the center I find a counter, and I take the opportunity to take some photos of the historic center. I return to the balcony, but I cannot leave Sciacca without going down to the beach and photographing the stacks and the rock arch. But then you have to face the whole 15% with the hand push of the bikes. Still on secondary roads, alongside the state road 115, we pass close to the dolmen of Sciacca. I took pictures of the cyclopean walls, but honestly I don’t think it was the dolmen, maybe it was further away, too bad. The GPS continually sends us astray and makes us waste time. We decide to abandon any delay and to make the last 15 kilometers on state highway 115. Then listening to the natives, they too admit the difficulty of dealing with maps and mobile phones and GPS.
In fact, tonight I have no internet connection, as long as I don’t want to spend the night on the hill with the phone looking for camp. We go down to Seccagrande, where there is nothing, practically everything is closed, no supermarket, just a tobacconist that sells some packaged croissants and fruit juices. A single restaurant, on top of the hill, no hotel open, not even B&B, we find an apartment, it is not exactly what we would have wanted, we try to satisfy ourselves.
All these inconveniences are offset by an incredible sea, on a pebble beach, of being truly in a place out of this world, so much so that some people ask us how we got here. On the seashore you can fish with nets. Tomorrow last ride, towards Scala dei Turchi and Agrigento. Meanwhile, today 63 km and 552 meters in altitude.
