6/28 -- Home!

Our day started early (but not ridiculous) with a trip to the airport at 7:30am. We had an uneventful trip to Paris and an hour of extra free time there when our plane to San Franciscso was delayed without explanation. We left for home around 5pm and got in 11 hours later at 7pm.

Luggage took forever, but by the time we got there, Erika and Jesse and the boys had finished Dylan's birthday dinner at Benihana, so they picked us up for a ride to our car and we got to spend a bit of time with them.

With a 9 hour time zone change, our waking time was around 24 hours, but I guess that's the price of entry for a trip to Europe. It was a great trip, and it's great to be home.

6/27 -- Orchard Visit, Get Close to Venice

Today was a lot of riding to get to a location outside of Venice in preparation for flying home tomorrow. We did have a stop a working orchard with lunch to break up the drive and took a couple photos of the Elephant Hotel interior before we left.

While  I zoned out, Jim documented some of the hills along the way.

We visited the Bortolotti Farm, which combines farming with tourism. They have about 35-45 acres planted, but in scattered fields. Where we were, they have apples and cherries. They grow berries and grapes for wine at other locations. They sell all their Chardonnay grapes to a winery, but they keep the red grapes for the father to make wine, which we got to try at lunch. We finally got up close to the Italian style of apple orchards, with trellised shorter skinny trees to make harvesting easier. This family keeps the apple trees for 45 years vs. the one we met earlier who replaced them every 10 years. They showed us how they cut back the number of apples twice a year so that the ones that were left would be bigger. A cluster is typically five apples, and will be reduced to just one so the tree can be more effective.

Their cherry trees were in a couple groups -- a newer area with shorter trees, but bushier than the apples, and an older section where the trees were still trellised but half again as tall. We got to tasted the cherries from the tree, and it was clear that the shorter, newer trees were producing bigger, juicier fruit. This was my first time eating fresh cherries, and I am a total convert. I have always had them processed or pitted them myself and baked them or made them into compote. I have  no idea why I resisted the idea of eating them fresh for so long, but clearly it was a mistake.

 

They walked us to a nearby stream which is a source of irrigation water. We went past normal sized cherry trees and they said they belonged to someone else who was no longer farming them for sale, but only to give the produce to friends and family.  It was obvious that the fruit on these trees was much smaller, so maybe the small tree/big fruit theory works.

We had a light lunch (in US terms, not Italian) which included polenta. It was pretty tasty and at the end, Carla showed us the pan they cooked the polenta in and pointed out how good the stuff is that gets overcooked on the sides of the pan.

Then it was back to the bus for two more hours to Villa Contarini Nenzi, a former private home that now has spacious rooms.

As a gift, Davide got us Italian Identity cards -- all we have to do is add our photos -- and we shared a delightful dinner with a singer/piano player (age 17!) and a clarinetist before saying good bye to our new friends, some of whom have to leave for the airport before we even get up in the morning.

6/26 -- Badia Valley and Novacella Abbey

Most of today we got out of the horrible 99+ heat here by heading up to the mountains, where it was only in the 80s. We also had a bus with good air conditioning, unlike yesterday's where nobody past the first row got any cooling. We had wonderful view of the Dolomites and interacted with people in the Ladin culture. Rhyming with 'latin', these folks had their own language that was heavily influenced by Latin. The language is used by about 30,000 people in the Dolomite valleys and is similar to the Swiss Romansch language. When shown a newspaper in Ladino, however, there was no sense of the Latin roots at all.

The road up was picturesque, but very curvy, so I tried to sleep while Jim tried to take photos out the bus window. We met our guide, Daniel, in a little town about 6800 feet up, where the temperature was  much more tolerable.  He told us that this place started providing skiing in the late 1940s -- the first lift up the mountain was a sled that was pulled by horses on the other side of a pulley, who walked down. It got its first real  lifts in the 50s and has expanded since then. Prior to skiing, this was a farming community and people started renting out spare rooms to the early skiers. This grew into guest houses and hotels and now tourism and skiing are the primary economic drivers. There is still farming because Italy thinks it will keep the land more pristine, but it is subsidized because farming here is no longer economically feasible otherwise.

 

The helicopter is taking summer supplies to the camping
huts and retrieving left-over winter supplies

In the upper right, there is a para-sailor.

Modern looking hotel and overpass (below)

This was in a park, and someone in our
group saw the same one along a trail. The
top language is Ladino.

We visited a lovely local church which is famous for an image of it being made into a puzzle that Jim says is familiar to him.

The Puzzle Church

Then we drove a bit to another Ladin family who has a restaurant in their home. By law, everything, except the wine, must be something they made. The food was good, and focused a lot on spinach with a beef stew and sausages for the main course. They also had an adorable little boy -- recently walking -- who everyone cooed over.

Back on the bus, most of us decided to visit an abbey that Davide spoke highly about. It is quite large, has a restaurant and conference center as well as a store to sell their products -- wine, jam, candy, and other foods. Dario showed us around. The highlights were the church and the library. The church was built in 1142 and modified and added on to over the years. The front of the church was added and is now a large altar section. The decorations were done by Bavarians during their Baroque period and are the over-the-top Rococo that they preferred. There is a lot that looks like stone, but the stone-like panels on the pillars were actually painted. The feeling they wanted to present was one of joy and happiness.

The round building is apparently a chapel. Some of
the windows near the bottom were waist high and deeply
indented. When I reached toward the  narrow opening
there was wonderful icy air.

Cloister hallway with burial chambers on the wall.

The apparent stone columns here are the
painted ones.

Dario pointed out how the leg of this man breaks the
frame of the painting, something I sometimes do with
stained glass.

The barrel-vaulted chamber held one of their three-piece
folding artworks, celebrating the Legend of St. Catherine,
who was apparently tortured and executed for becoming
Christian. There were also paintings on the back.

I didn't quite capture all of this art piece. There
was a triangle at the top of the middle ladder,
representing the assent to heaven for believers.
The bent staircase on left shows that sinners
won't make it, and neither will  non-believers,
represented by the short rightmost ladder.

This had initially been the hall of scribes, and was converted
into a library after the printing press obsoleted them. It could
take 4 years to copy one book, and it involved many people
to help prepare the vellum, make the ink, etc. The books here
have been bought or donated and rebound to look like a set.

The two cases in the middle held Gregorian chant books.
They have words and notes alternating on the page and
are made huge so that all the choir members could read
from the same book, since multiple copies were so time-
consuming to do.

 We caught a public bus back to the hotel, and finished most of our packing for our trip home, and to try to cool off. The thick walls of the hotel kept the interior to only 81, and I am hoping that our two bottles of sparkling wine to bring home didn't already cook and will survive the long layover in Paris where the temperatures are just as bad as here.

6/25 -- Explore Bolzano, Iceman Museum, and Plose Mountain

We hopped on the train to Bolzano today to look around, learn about the German vs Italian situation in the South Tyrol, and to visit the Iceman Museum and learn more about Otzi, the alpine mummy discovered in September, 1991.

The train system here is easy to use and reasonably on time. According to Davide, if you book in advance, it is reasonably priced too. Bolzano (Bozen in German) is the home of the museum dedicated to the Iceman. It is also fairly large -- over 100,000 residents, with a pedestrian city center.

Our first stop was the Civic Museum for a lecture on the last 100 years here after the region became Italian. Leonard explained that the partition which divided the area called the Tyrol into North and South after WWI was not advantageous to the majority German-speaking community. Although 70% of residents spoke German as a first language, overnight, the German-speaking teachers were replaced with Italians, all classes were taught  in Italian, and the German language was completely repressed. It was kept alive in underground schools and in homes, but German-speaking citizens were effectively barred from municipal jobs and had to conduct all their business in Italian. Over time, the laws were changed but the distribution of jobs to native Italian speakers continued. Finally, it was decided that the  municipal job holders should reflect the proportion of German speakers in the area, and this is adjusted after each census, but  it has remained  pretty stable.

We got a chance to walk up to the top of the tower in the museum and get an expansive view over the city from each direction.

Then it was off to learn about Otzi, the iced in mummy found in 1991. At first, he was thought to be a local man who had died in the last 20 years or so, then maybe from 100 years ago, to 500-600 years. It wasn't until university staff got their first chance to analyze him more than a week later that they announced he had died from 5100 to 5300 years ago. Since his discovery, a lot of research has been done on him and his belongings, and knowledge increases each year as scientific methods improve or useful inventions appear. We now know what he ate and wore, that he was killed by an arrow, that he may have been a shaman and traveled around quite a bit. Some of the floors of the museum did  not allow pictures, but one of my favorite areas did--a  life-sized recreation of his probable appearance. Otzi was about 45, old for his time. He wore leggings, a loin cloth, and a coat that may not have had sleeves. He also had a grass cloak and a wolf skin hat.

Then it was lunch time, and hot out, making us not that hungry so we split a mini pizza and a coke and wandered around until it was time to go back to Brixen. We visited the church with the green roof we had seen when we first arrived and especially appreciated how much cooler it was in there. In theory, we have gotten adapted to being active outside when the temperature is in the 80s, but when it is pushing 100, we slow down a lot.

We took the train back to Blixen where there was a bus waiting to take us to a small ski lift gondola at Plose Mountain for a snack (Jim and I had the apple strudel) and a chance to see the Dolomites, which look totally different than the Alps. The air was much cooler -- though 10 degrees warmer than anticipated. We walked 4 miles or more on an undulating trail at 6600-7100 feet, visiting cows on the path and refreshing ourselves from the 90 degree heat at the cold water troughs along the way while ogling the Dolomites. Then we took the gondola back down and the bus to the hotel to cool off before dinner.

There is a bike in the center of the O and it looks like you
can hop on and try to go completely around the circle.

Alps in the distance to the north

Rocky Dolomites to the south

 

Wood sculpture. This trail was designed for kids, so
presumably, it was for climbing on.

Wild azaleas were all over, but not nearly as showy as the
ones you get at a local nursery.

Another wood sculpture. This one had several other
undulating segments that looked like they were going
in and out of the ground.

View of the valley from the 4-6 person gondola

View heading back down