Around Northern Italy in 10 Days
July 2-11, 2006


 Austria/Fern pass

With an early start at 6 am, we soon crossed the border into Austria. We made several stops, since we liked the drive through in the Alps the famous 1212 m high Fern pass.

 Zugspitzblick:
 One of the stops was for 'breakfast' where we had a wonderful view on German’s highest Mountain: the Zugspitze.



 Oetztal/Timmenjoch

  Soelden
 When we came through the first typical Austrian little village Paul was really excited… good thing we have lots of time for stopping like at a Music festival in Soelden. What we liked was the typical Austrian houses, the high mountains, the covered roads – to protect them from avalanches, some little rivers and waterfalls... some wide rivers.


 Then from there on it went uphill… our car did great, even we were not the fasted one uphill. Paul would have liked it to cruise here with the Mustang. They say it’s Tirol’s most scenic route and we have to say we liked it a lot… sometimes we wish we had more time to stop and go for more little explorations. Highest point was the Timmelsjoch, when we were up at an elevation of 2474 m… since it’s so steep and narrow it’s closed for trailers and trucks.

The best on the way down was when we saw all the Porsche cars... ok one had a lot of steam coming out of the engine… but it was one cool trip. And then looking down the hill and seeing the street going down.

So after getting used to the Austrian speed limits… no it was time Paul learns the Italian ones.

 
 Bolzano / Italy

We arrived our today’s destination in the afternoon… sure coming in through an industrial area is maybe not the most exciting part… but who cares, we had our room in the youth hostel with a gorgeous view.

Let’s explore this first Italian town: once roman – then in 679 it became Bavarian – then the Austrian took over and today it’s again Italian.

And since we are in Italy, nearly the first thing on our discovery was some ice cream on the Walther Platz with the Dome: Walther von the Vogelweide was a German Mienesinger – not much is known about him, maybe he was a poor knight with no land.

Walking through the narrow streets (nearly alone) was a lot of fun, especially when the houses are so interesting to check out... all kind of colours and pictures. And even it is Italy, a lot of signs where still in German. But we didn’t visited "Oetzi" – because here in the museum in Bozen is Oetzi the Iceman – he lived here around 3000 BC and was found in the mountains in 1991 on 3200 m high elevation by some German tourist. What’s interesting is, that they found that he had still intact red blood cells in the body.

We came across a nice Bridge and by the Victory Monument: built after WWI in 1928 by Mussolini when South Tyrol became independent from Austria. Walking along the river we had some great views on the Dolomite Mountains.