I knew that the ½ litre of local wine with my dinner and the delicious dessert wine that arrived unbidden with my coffee (with an unbidden €4 on the bill) would wipe me out. All I want to do is go to sleep, but I do need to catch up, so here goes…(actually, I just couldn’t stay awake, and it’s now 5:30am on Sunday in Milan).
Today I had breakfast in Germany, lunch in Austria and dinner in Italy. Breakfast at the Hotel Hanselewirt, great selection of cakes, bread etc. Being German, there was plenty of meat there too. I had a roll with some ham and cheese, amongst a load of other stuff.
No time to see Neuschwanstein Castle, unfortunately, because I have a hotel booked in Ardenno, and it will take all day to get there. The Castle was on yesterday’s itinerary. The plan was to go over the Stelvio Pass today.
To prevent the GPS taking me via a shorter or quicker route, I set it for Merano first. I did get to glimpse the castle to my left as I rode out of town in the direction of Innsbruck. The GPS (a Garmin Zumo, I’ll refer to as Zumo henceforth) redeemed itself today and took me through a gorgeous valley and over the Timmelsjoch high alpine road, in the Austrian Tyrol. At the start of the pass is a restaurant, toll gate and motorcycle museum combined in a new building at 2175 metres (about the height of Kosciuszko, Australia’s highest mountain). Lunch here, but I skipped the museum.
The pass was incredible, achingly beautiful, with a smooth well graded road perfect for motorcycles, quite precipitous in places, and not much traffic. Quite a few bikes though. I can’t really describe how beautiful it was on a sunny day, or capture it in photos. You have to be there, on a bike.
In Merano, a big town, I found a petrol station that turned out to be self serve. I had a go with the credit card, but it didn’t work, so tried €10 cash worth for a start, about 6.8 litres. I figured the bike would take another €5 worth and be nearly full, and the bike just managed to swallow it. The bike’s fuel economy is quite amazing, 25km/litre, especially considering the terrain, it wasn’t just freeway cruising. At the petrol station two very smartly turned out Carabinieri arrived on a pair of Aprilias. One of them tried to fill his bike, nothing happened, and I had the pleasure of directing them to the self serve pay station.
Off to Stelvio. It was about 3pm, a bit later than I wanted, but still plenty of time to get to Ardenno for dinner. I reset Zumo to head for the hotel in Ardenno. In retrospect I should have specified Bormio to give it no choice. The road signs indicated we were headed for Passo Stelvio, but in Sponding it failed to send me left toward Stelvio, instead heading the long way round via Zernez. A quick U-turn and we were headed in the right direction.
Actually, compared with Timmelsjoch, Stelvio was something of an anticlimax. Completely different, approaching from the Austrian side it was a series of 49 switchbacks, all taken in first gear. On the left handers you just stick to the right and pick a good speed, a bit like a roundabout. On the right handers you start on the left (if no oncoming vehicle), and very gingerly turn sharp uphill right, craning your neck to see if something approaching the corner from above is about to take you out. If it’s clear you can speed up slightly, increase the radius of your turn and exit on the wrong side of the road. By now I was was used to riding on the right side of the road and have stopped thinking about it, it just seems natural.
At the top are the usual great alpine views, and a lot of tourist tat for sale, and no public toilets, a feature of Italy, as I was to learn. Very unlike France in that respect.
The descent from Stelvio was through very different country, more switchbacks at first, then a run through high sweeping valleys, then the descent to Bormio.
Arrived at the hotel at about 7pm after the usual search in small back streets using Google Maps to locate the place. Another very nice hotel.
Dinner was local fare. I had rabbit, for the first time in decades, very good.