Super-trip: on the road

Two days after arriving in Italy, refreshed from the relaxing shores of Lago di Como, we were on the move. I was in favor of using mass transit for our whole trip, but Henry wanted to drive all the way, so we compromised. 

The first part of our Italian sojourn involved small towns and parking included with our hotels, as well as twisty mountain roads that Henry was keen to drive on...

...so it made sense to make this section our driving adventure. When we got to Siena, where parking is problematic, and Florence, where it's horribly expensive (if not impossible) we traded our car in for buses and trains.

But that's getting ahead of myself. First we had the drive from Lake Como to the South Tyrol, our second destination.

There are two ways to get there, and we thought, looking at the map, that the northern route would be more scenic. For one thing, the road hugs the eastern shore of Lake Como for miles, so we were looking forward to lots of views like this...

view of Lake Como as we climbed out of Varenna

However, what we got instead were lots of views like this...

Yes, the efficient northern Italians have opted for the speedy travel aid of tunnels over scenic, winding mountain roads. Miles and miles of tunnels, some well over a kilometer long (at least you get some warning; a helpful sign as you enter tells you how long the tunnel is).

As we turned east from the Lake, we lost the tunnels, but gained lots of little towns with many roundabouts that our GPS had some difficulty with. Not to mention a random polizia stop which was somewhat alarming! (fortunately coming to nothing)

But the trip, while taking a couple of hours longer than it was supposed to, was overall quite pleasant.

Although we regretted the lack of lake views, there was plenty of scenery...

hillside with vines

a lovely valley

mountains in the distance...

...and mountains close-up, with a village for scale

As we traversed a few national parks and ski areas, the mountains were really spectacular...

I have to keep reminding myself that while civilization is older in Europe than in North America, the mountains are lots younger. So rugged and supremely photogenic!

Even after we left our winding little road, with its crazy motorbike riders, some of which had certainly not taken this extraordinary safety message to heart...

I took lots of pictures of unusual Italian road signs;
there will be a whole post of them coming up eventually

...the scenery along the Autostrada was still stunning...

After Bolzano/Bozen (I'll explain the dual-language thing in my next post) we left the big road again and got to wind some more. Although we followed the Autostrada for a while:

A few hours late, but still in time for dinner and a stroll, we reached our destination in the Dolomites: Kastelruth/Castelrotto. Here's a little teaser of what's to come:

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If you want to see everywhere that we drove (and get a preview of coming blog attractions) here is a map. (The mass transit section of the trip is shown in a separate map that I'll link to when the time comes.)