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ilanaramaSaturday June 10th was a busy day for us, as it was the first day of transition from the Lombardy bicycling phase of our trip to the Dolomites hiking phase. As I mentioned last post, we shared a taxi to Angera and then took the ferry to Arona, where we took a series of three trains to Trento, changing in Milan and Verona. The Milan-to-Verona train was exactly the same one we had taken to Peschiera Del Garda to begin the bike tour; strange to realize that the distance we took six days to bicycle across could be covered in half a day by train! Of course, it’s the journey, not the destination…
North from Peschiera Del Garda it was new terrain for us, as the train whisked us up the Adige river valley. Pretty terrain, too; close in was farmland, a lot of vineyards and orchards and fields, and green hills behind on both sides. We arrived in Trento around 3pm, and it was a short walk across a park to the hotel where Britt had made reservations.
I hadn’t known anything at all about Trento (even that we were going there, heh, because Britt had taken care of all of this part of the trip, and all I knew was, Dolomites!) and Britt had just chosen it as a convenient place to break our journey so we wouldn’t have a super long travel day, so we took a few minutes in our room to look at the brochures and maps the hotel reception had given us. We immediately zeroed in on Buonconsiglio Castle, a fortress with 13th century origins that now holds the Provincial Gallery of Art, and because we’d be leaving late the next morning, not long after it opened, we decided we’d best see it that afternoon even though we wouldn’t have a whole lot of time. As it turned out we were too late to see the most famous frescoes, the “Cycle of the Months” in the Aquila Tower which has a restricted and timed entry for an extra charge, but we still were able to see quite a lot of this magnificent structure and the art within.
When they shooed us out (yes, we were about the last people to leave!) we headed for an intriguing-looking public garden we’d walked by on the way there, and it was so pretty and fragrant we had to sit on a bench and just enjoy our surroundings for a while.
We had dinner just around the corner in the outdoor seating of Ristorante Pizzeria Anfiteatro (Amphitheater). We were amused to see one of the nearby tables occupied by a dinner party of five or six little girls, each maybe ten years old at the most. The only difference between them and any of the other groups of diners was the lack of wine!
The next morning we left our baggage with the hotel and explored the historic old town a bit more than we had the previous night. It’s a beautiful city, with buildings of many eras and designs, and the limestone foothills of the Dolomites behind as a backdrop. It made for a good introduction to the Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol region – quite different from Lombardy! For one thing, it’s not far from the Austrian border, and in fact was part of Austria from 1815 until 1919, and German is a ubiquitous second language. In Trento, road signs and restaurant menus were in both languages, with Italian on top and German beneath; in the small towns and ski resorts of the Dolomites, it was the other way around! Another language that we saw and heard ever more frequently as we got deeper into the mountains was the regional language Ladin. It reminded me a bit of when we were in Catalonia in Spain in 2019, where Catalan is ubiquitous and primary to Spanish.
From Trento we continued up the Adige river valley by train. The scenery was much the same as it had been the afternoon before, except that the green hills behind the vineyards grew into impressive limestone cliffs as we climbed toward the mountains.
It’s a good thing it was beautiful scenery, as we got to see it multiple times; the train we’d expected to take from Verona all the way to Bressanone reversed direction in Bolzano. (We should have gotten a clue when everyone got off! But our tickets did not show us changing trains, so.) Fortunately a conductor came through the car before I gave in to complete panic (Britt, who is much more clear-headed than I am when facing unexpected setbacks, was already trying to figure out alternate routes) and he advised us to get off at Ora, and then take the next northbound train which really would go all the way to Bressanone.
The Bressanone bus station was on the other side of the parking lot from the train station, and although we had missed the bus we had planned to take due to our back-and-forth train rides, we managed to get on another and fumble out enough euros to pay. (We’d been using a credit card for nearly everything, and had got by with the 25 euros I had left from our Greece trip for everything else, but with a number of bus rides on the horizon we had rightly figured we should have more cash and hit an ATM in Trento.) It took us three buses to get to San Vigilio; we almost missed our last bus in San Lorenzo as we were looking for a, you know, bus - fortunately I spotted the small van on the other side of the bus stop and asked the driver if that was the San Vigilio bus, and he waved us aboard, just in time.
We got off at the church square in the tiny resort town of San Vigilio di Marebbe and made our way around the corner and uphill to our hotel, the “Excelsior Dolomites Life Resort” which, you may squint dubiously at that name but it was a wonderful place to end that long travel day, especially since we got there at quarter to five, just in time to enjoy the free appetizers they served in the afternoon, along with a “welcome cocktail” (glass of prosecco), both of which by then we desperately needed.
The Lombardy trip had been – not a budget trip, exactly, but when our friends set it up they were mindful that many of those they wanted to invite needed to keep expenses low. When Britt put our Dolomites trip together, though, he was willing to pay for a certain amount of luxury, and I have to say that it was an excellent choice, and really not that expensive. (Especially not in the light of our airfare!) In the Dolomites we were in 4-star hotels that provided comfortable rooms and always had pools and spas, though the concept of a hot tub that is actually hot appears to be unknown here, alas. Our rates included both breakfast and dinner at each hotel, and the dinners were all gourmet and very tasty, set menus with a choice of two or three things for each course – starter, first course, second course, and dessert, and usually bread and salad at a buffet. The only extra expense was wine. (Which we of course paid, because wine with dinner is necessary!) It was a really nice way to do things, much less stressful than trying to find a restaurant each night and figure out what to order once there. The food at the Excelsior was excellent, and the desserts were works of art:
Before dinner that night we met with the representative from Holimites, the company that had arranged our tour. Daniel gave us a waterproof flip-book with the text description for each day on one side and on the other a distance/elevation chart with huts marked where we could get lunch, set up on a ring so that each day’s hike information could be removed from the book and taken with us, with the rest left in our bags. He also gave us two very nice maps and drew each day’s route in pink or orange highlighter as he pointed out the huts and other points of interest. He also made a few suggestions for hiking the next day, since Britt had built in an extra day at the Excelsior before our hike proper started – which worked out great, since it gave us time to get our (huge pile of) laundry washed. (It felt very luxurious to have someone else do the laundry! I’d done some minor handwashing during the bike trip, but we’d definitely accumulated a lot of dirty clothes.)
The next morning we set out to hike to Crusc da Rit, a high point on the ridge above San Vigilio. Much of the hike was on dirt roads, though they were not frequently used other than to get supplies to the huts and restaurants and to bring tourists up to the starting point of a zipline. (We saw it in several places – and also saw and heard the excited tourists as they zoomed above our heads!) We also saw a few mountain bikers.
But as in Lombardy, what we mostly saw was flowers! We’re used to seeing flowers on our hikes in our home mountains in Colorado, and although some of the flowers we saw in the Dolomites, like gentians and alpine forget-me-nots, were familiar to us, many were not.
In fact, the whole experience of the Dolomites was for me very much “exactly the same yet completely different.” We have mountains, too – but the rocks are different, so they’ve eroded into different shapes. The trees and bushes are different. The birdsong is different. Even the air is different, since the trails we hiked through here are at much lower elevation than the mountains of our local areas. (Of course there are Alpine mountains with similar elevations to those of Colorado, but climbing those is a matter of mountaineering, not hiking. Colorado’s highest peaks are non-technical in the summer.) Today’s high point, Crusc da Rit, was a little over 6600’ – 300 feet lower than our house!
And of course this area is much more populated and civilized compared to our hiking areas in Colorado. It’s kind of funny that we came here for our vacation because it sounded like fun to be able to hike from hotel to hotel and even have lunch (with beer!) on the mountain, but Daniel and other locals we spoke with often told us how much they wanted to go backpacking in Colorado’s huge wilderness areas, where you might not see another person for days. I mean, we love that, too, but it’s definitely a different sort of hiking.
Another difference we noticed throughout the Dolomites was the presence of Jesus. No, I haven’t suddenly gotten religion, I’m talking literally, or at least, symbolically. Mountain summits and high points were frequently marked by huge crosses, and we saw little shrines everywhere, some for Mary, but mostly elaborate crucifixes under slope-roofed shelters we jokingly referred to (between ourselves) as “Jesus houses”.
Overall, it was a beautiful hike, though at over 11 miles and 3100’ of elevation gain/loss it was maybe a little intense for a warm-up day!
But it piqued our appetite for the hike to come, and the next morning we set out early enough to make the first bus to Pederü, where we'd start our through-hike...
...except oops, we got on the wrong bus. It was completely my fault, we were speaking in broken German and broken English to an Austrian couple who were going to start their own hike at Furkelpass, and for some reason I thought that Pederü was on the way to Furkelpass, especially since the bus was leaving at the right time and it had a similar number, which I should have doublechecked (we needed 462, got on 463). We only noticed when we headed up switchbacks in the decidedly wrong direction. Again I started to feel the panic build (I am really not good with surprise setbacks!) but the bus driver assured us that we'd get back to San Vigilio in time to catch the second bus to Pederü, and after what was an admittedly scenic drive (though I didn't envy the driver, as the switchbacks were terribly narrow for a full-sized bus) we returned to the bus stop. Ten minutes later, we got on the correct bus, and started our Dolomites adventure for real.
North from Peschiera Del Garda it was new terrain for us, as the train whisked us up the Adige river valley. Pretty terrain, too; close in was farmland, a lot of vineyards and orchards and fields, and green hills behind on both sides. We arrived in Trento around 3pm, and it was a short walk across a park to the hotel where Britt had made reservations.
I hadn’t known anything at all about Trento (even that we were going there, heh, because Britt had taken care of all of this part of the trip, and all I knew was, Dolomites!) and Britt had just chosen it as a convenient place to break our journey so we wouldn’t have a super long travel day, so we took a few minutes in our room to look at the brochures and maps the hotel reception had given us. We immediately zeroed in on Buonconsiglio Castle, a fortress with 13th century origins that now holds the Provincial Gallery of Art, and because we’d be leaving late the next morning, not long after it opened, we decided we’d best see it that afternoon even though we wouldn’t have a whole lot of time. As it turned out we were too late to see the most famous frescoes, the “Cycle of the Months” in the Aquila Tower which has a restricted and timed entry for an extra charge, but we still were able to see quite a lot of this magnificent structure and the art within.
When they shooed us out (yes, we were about the last people to leave!) we headed for an intriguing-looking public garden we’d walked by on the way there, and it was so pretty and fragrant we had to sit on a bench and just enjoy our surroundings for a while.
We had dinner just around the corner in the outdoor seating of Ristorante Pizzeria Anfiteatro (Amphitheater). We were amused to see one of the nearby tables occupied by a dinner party of five or six little girls, each maybe ten years old at the most. The only difference between them and any of the other groups of diners was the lack of wine!
The next morning we left our baggage with the hotel and explored the historic old town a bit more than we had the previous night. It’s a beautiful city, with buildings of many eras and designs, and the limestone foothills of the Dolomites behind as a backdrop. It made for a good introduction to the Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol region – quite different from Lombardy! For one thing, it’s not far from the Austrian border, and in fact was part of Austria from 1815 until 1919, and German is a ubiquitous second language. In Trento, road signs and restaurant menus were in both languages, with Italian on top and German beneath; in the small towns and ski resorts of the Dolomites, it was the other way around! Another language that we saw and heard ever more frequently as we got deeper into the mountains was the regional language Ladin. It reminded me a bit of when we were in Catalonia in Spain in 2019, where Catalan is ubiquitous and primary to Spanish.
From Trento we continued up the Adige river valley by train. The scenery was much the same as it had been the afternoon before, except that the green hills behind the vineyards grew into impressive limestone cliffs as we climbed toward the mountains.
It’s a good thing it was beautiful scenery, as we got to see it multiple times; the train we’d expected to take from Verona all the way to Bressanone reversed direction in Bolzano. (We should have gotten a clue when everyone got off! But our tickets did not show us changing trains, so.) Fortunately a conductor came through the car before I gave in to complete panic (Britt, who is much more clear-headed than I am when facing unexpected setbacks, was already trying to figure out alternate routes) and he advised us to get off at Ora, and then take the next northbound train which really would go all the way to Bressanone.
The Bressanone bus station was on the other side of the parking lot from the train station, and although we had missed the bus we had planned to take due to our back-and-forth train rides, we managed to get on another and fumble out enough euros to pay. (We’d been using a credit card for nearly everything, and had got by with the 25 euros I had left from our Greece trip for everything else, but with a number of bus rides on the horizon we had rightly figured we should have more cash and hit an ATM in Trento.) It took us three buses to get to San Vigilio; we almost missed our last bus in San Lorenzo as we were looking for a, you know, bus - fortunately I spotted the small van on the other side of the bus stop and asked the driver if that was the San Vigilio bus, and he waved us aboard, just in time.
We got off at the church square in the tiny resort town of San Vigilio di Marebbe and made our way around the corner and uphill to our hotel, the “Excelsior Dolomites Life Resort” which, you may squint dubiously at that name but it was a wonderful place to end that long travel day, especially since we got there at quarter to five, just in time to enjoy the free appetizers they served in the afternoon, along with a “welcome cocktail” (glass of prosecco), both of which by then we desperately needed.
The Lombardy trip had been – not a budget trip, exactly, but when our friends set it up they were mindful that many of those they wanted to invite needed to keep expenses low. When Britt put our Dolomites trip together, though, he was willing to pay for a certain amount of luxury, and I have to say that it was an excellent choice, and really not that expensive. (Especially not in the light of our airfare!) In the Dolomites we were in 4-star hotels that provided comfortable rooms and always had pools and spas, though the concept of a hot tub that is actually hot appears to be unknown here, alas. Our rates included both breakfast and dinner at each hotel, and the dinners were all gourmet and very tasty, set menus with a choice of two or three things for each course – starter, first course, second course, and dessert, and usually bread and salad at a buffet. The only extra expense was wine. (Which we of course paid, because wine with dinner is necessary!) It was a really nice way to do things, much less stressful than trying to find a restaurant each night and figure out what to order once there. The food at the Excelsior was excellent, and the desserts were works of art:
Before dinner that night we met with the representative from Holimites, the company that had arranged our tour. Daniel gave us a waterproof flip-book with the text description for each day on one side and on the other a distance/elevation chart with huts marked where we could get lunch, set up on a ring so that each day’s hike information could be removed from the book and taken with us, with the rest left in our bags. He also gave us two very nice maps and drew each day’s route in pink or orange highlighter as he pointed out the huts and other points of interest. He also made a few suggestions for hiking the next day, since Britt had built in an extra day at the Excelsior before our hike proper started – which worked out great, since it gave us time to get our (huge pile of) laundry washed. (It felt very luxurious to have someone else do the laundry! I’d done some minor handwashing during the bike trip, but we’d definitely accumulated a lot of dirty clothes.)
The next morning we set out to hike to Crusc da Rit, a high point on the ridge above San Vigilio. Much of the hike was on dirt roads, though they were not frequently used other than to get supplies to the huts and restaurants and to bring tourists up to the starting point of a zipline. (We saw it in several places – and also saw and heard the excited tourists as they zoomed above our heads!) We also saw a few mountain bikers.
But as in Lombardy, what we mostly saw was flowers! We’re used to seeing flowers on our hikes in our home mountains in Colorado, and although some of the flowers we saw in the Dolomites, like gentians and alpine forget-me-nots, were familiar to us, many were not.
In fact, the whole experience of the Dolomites was for me very much “exactly the same yet completely different.” We have mountains, too – but the rocks are different, so they’ve eroded into different shapes. The trees and bushes are different. The birdsong is different. Even the air is different, since the trails we hiked through here are at much lower elevation than the mountains of our local areas. (Of course there are Alpine mountains with similar elevations to those of Colorado, but climbing those is a matter of mountaineering, not hiking. Colorado’s highest peaks are non-technical in the summer.) Today’s high point, Crusc da Rit, was a little over 6600’ – 300 feet lower than our house!
And of course this area is much more populated and civilized compared to our hiking areas in Colorado. It’s kind of funny that we came here for our vacation because it sounded like fun to be able to hike from hotel to hotel and even have lunch (with beer!) on the mountain, but Daniel and other locals we spoke with often told us how much they wanted to go backpacking in Colorado’s huge wilderness areas, where you might not see another person for days. I mean, we love that, too, but it’s definitely a different sort of hiking.
Another difference we noticed throughout the Dolomites was the presence of Jesus. No, I haven’t suddenly gotten religion, I’m talking literally, or at least, symbolically. Mountain summits and high points were frequently marked by huge crosses, and we saw little shrines everywhere, some for Mary, but mostly elaborate crucifixes under slope-roofed shelters we jokingly referred to (between ourselves) as “Jesus houses”.
Overall, it was a beautiful hike, though at over 11 miles and 3100’ of elevation gain/loss it was maybe a little intense for a warm-up day!
But it piqued our appetite for the hike to come, and the next morning we set out early enough to make the first bus to Pederü, where we'd start our through-hike...
...except oops, we got on the wrong bus. It was completely my fault, we were speaking in broken German and broken English to an Austrian couple who were going to start their own hike at Furkelpass, and for some reason I thought that Pederü was on the way to Furkelpass, especially since the bus was leaving at the right time and it had a similar number, which I should have doublechecked (we needed 462, got on 463). We only noticed when we headed up switchbacks in the decidedly wrong direction. Again I started to feel the panic build (I am really not good with surprise setbacks!) but the bus driver assured us that we'd get back to San Vigilio in time to catch the second bus to Pederü, and after what was an admittedly scenic drive (though I didn't envy the driver, as the switchbacks were terribly narrow for a full-sized bus) we returned to the bus stop. Ten minutes later, we got on the correct bus, and started our Dolomites adventure for real.
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