….or so it seemed. Today was our day to drive through the Dolomite Mountains. Fortunately it was a lovely sunny blue day making the scenery was absolutely breathtaking. This range of mountains, in the northeastern part of Italy, is part of the southern alps and rises to a height of about 3500 meters. The road is relatively well maintained and not really all that hard to drive. In one pass there were some 35 switchbacks and in another about 27. Lots of braking and turning but George seems to have got the hang of it. The road is even wide enough that we passed a few busses without incident.

The upper reaches are used for skiing and run after run could be seen from the road. Some even went over the road by means of bridges. All of the ski operations seemed to be closed for the season but we did see one lone skier making his way down a long gentle slope – probably one of his last runs of the season. There were some areas where the snow by the side of the road was 6′ deep but on the sunny slopes most of it had melted. The road climbed to just over 2200 meters and we were both surprised by how lovely and warm it felt, having expected that it would be much cooler as we climbed.

We stopped in Bolzano to visit Otzi – the 5000 year old ice man found in 1991. I encourage you to google him to see what he looks like since we couldn’t take photos. We didn’t have a lot of time since tonight’s stop was at a B&B and we wanted to arrive in reasonably good time. We spent about 45 minutes learning about how he was found, all of the research that has been done on him and how they have been able to piece together his story.

We were both very glad to get to our B&B tonight which I think will be the story for tomorrow. It’s right out of an historical Italian romance novel. Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you more.