Not sure what this was all about

The plan for today was to go to Cortina d’Ampezzo, base from there for a few days and hit a ton of mountain passes in the Dolomites between Italy and Austria.  If you have ever traveled with the Rasmussen’s, you know, things don’t always go as planned.  Italy is seeing record heat right now and the mountains are expecting an inch or more of rain each day for the next 3 days.  Recalculating…

So, we headed toward Lake Garda, Italy’s largest lake.  The forecast did not call for rain in this area over the next few days and the average temps for this time of year at about 71ºF.  Today, it was closer to 96ºF.  Thank goodness for the neck coolers our friend Elaine made for us.  They were life savers!

Such jagged peaks!

Regardless, we had a great day of riding.  Headed north out of Bologna, we leaned to the hills north of Verona.  It always cracks me up how it takes us 5 hours to go what would be 1.25 if we took the direct route, but that’s the joy in it.  The roads in this area don’t often have a center line, but the drivers here just get it, so it’s no big deal.  I would imagine that Kevin thinks that the time spent on these roads will make me more open to more goat-paths back home but they don’t have Italian drivers on them.  Glad I packed snacks because lunch places that are open are few and far between.  We ended up stopping at a restaurant whose posted hours did not match their actual hours, but were lucky the lady offered to make us a sandwich.  I envisioned bologna on white bread, but it was salami/cheese on the most amazing Italian bread.  2 sandwiches, a large bottle of water, an espresso and tip = €8!

Toward the end of the day, we fell in line with 2 bikes with German tags and ran for a little while.  It was a ton of fun!

The internet here is rough, so all we got uploaded are two pictures (hey, I can’t control which two) and no video because we keep getting dropped.  So that we don’t fall behind like we did in Bologna, we’ll post them as soon as internet speed allows.

Keeping an eye on the weather tonight to decide our next move.

Thanks for following along.  Buona notte!