Ilanarama!

The hiking plan laid out for us from Sëlva di Val Gardena to Compatsch was 11.8 miles with more elevation loss than gain. This would be accomplished by taking the bus from Sëlva to Passo Sella, about 2000’ higher, and beginning the hike there. (The Dolomites region is well-served by buses, and tourists are given cards at the hotels to allow free bus travel within the area – a really awesome idea that more places should embrace, in my opinion.)

We had an inkling this plan might not work the previous night, when we looked at the information booklet about the mountain bike race scheduled for that day. The road to Passo Sella would be closed for a couple of hours in the morning, but as the race was not taking that particular road (it used the dirt and gravel roads that made up many of the marked “trails”) we figured that we’d just have to start our hike a little later. But in the morning we discovered that not only was the road to Passo Sella closed, none of the buses would be running all day!

( Time for plan C. )

Saturday 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…



( Adventures and misadventures getting to the Dolomites! )

I've been sadly remiss about writing up our recent vacations...and then I realized that I had a hard time recalling the details if I didn't write them up. So I'm determined to do a trip report for this one - bicycling and hiking in Italy! This is the first section of (probably) four; if you'd rather not read a WIP, I'll be posting an index when it's all done.

Britt and I had never thought much about Italy as a vacation destination, but when our friends Frank and June said they wanted to put together a group to do a bike trip around Lombardy – they’d done a bicycling tour of Ireland they enjoyed, but they had felt that it would have been more fun with friends – we said sure, sign us up! (I find that saying “sure, I’ll do that” to any opportunity is generally the best philosophy in life, or at least the most fun.) And if we were going to take the time and expense to fly to Europe, we might as well spend more time there, so Britt arranged a rather luxe self-guided hiking trip in the Dolomites for the following week, as ever since our Coast-to-Coast highlights hike in England, we had wanted to do more of the “dayhike from inn to inn and have someone else ferry the luggage” type of touring. So that was our June vacation, basically: a week cycling in Lombardy with friends and their friends, a week hiking in the Dolomites on our own, which along with travel there, back, and in the middle came out to three weeks in Italy.

( Getting there (in OMG FIRST CLASS) and days 1-3 of the cycling tour )

All the photos, none of the words (well, there are captions!): https://www.flickr.com/photos/svwindom/albums/72177720309412489/with/53008360297/