Day 5 (Monday)I get some more Euros out at the local bank in the village near the campground. There is white marble everywhere, a by-product of their local quarrying.
We have a relaxed breakfast and hit the road, heading east again, this time further into Italy towards the Dolomite mountains. For the moment we have the luxury of level highway, and it is a nice relief to be in the valleys not climbing or descending mountain passes - this won't last long.
We navigate some short sections of Italian toll road - Autostrade, before climbing back onto another twisty mountain road heading up into the Dolomites. Part way along we decide we need to buy some maps, so we stop near a cable-car station. There is a town, Cavalese, on the hill opposite. I know it will be narrow streets and difficult parking so I search the GPS for parking in that town and set it to navigate there. On the way out of the cable car station car park we see a sign for white water rafting, that gets Sally all excited.
We climb up to Cavalese - the first car park doesn't look camper compatible, but carrying on through the main piazza we find more parking by the town sports complex. The parking seems to have a forest of different signs all indicating different parking durations allowed, and it is not clear which applies to which parking space. Stuffed between the dashboard and the windshield I keep a fading plastic parking disk purchased in France years ago - you set the time to indicate what time you arrived. I assume the Italian parking attendants (if any are working today) will accept the French parking disk. We walk in the direction of the town centre and find the tourist office. They are very friendly and speak excellent English. They don't know where the nearest white water rafting is though and have to look up a phone number. I.e. they don't know that if you take the cable car just below their office it leads to a rafting centre, or that (as I discovered later) that rafting centre's office is next door to the information centre.
We carry on and find a map shop. I spend ages trying to find maps of the ares in the Dolomites we want to walk in. Sally gets frustrated, but I know we will be more frustrated later if I have the wrong maps. Sally wanted to stay for an ice cream, but I was worried about the parking - I had wasted more time than I expected looking at maps and was conscious some of the parking signs said 30 minutes only. It is a pity, because it looks like a nice place to spend some time:
We hit the road again heading further east and soon see the distinctive bare shapes of the Dolomite mountains rising up above the forests.
I have put waypoints in the GPS for the major places we want to go hiking / climbing and 3 campgrounds that look like the type we will enjoy. We stop to have a look at the first one, up a forested valley. It is cheap, but Sally isn't overly impressed. She says it will be fine if there is nothing better, but insists we should try the next one on the GPS.
The next one is more central to our destinations and is on the door step of the actual Dolomites just above the village of Pozza di Fassa. Many of the buildings have lovely murals painted on them - we notice this throughout the region in the coming days, including in Austria and Germany:
The campground is very high quality, with an Italian restaurant and a health spa and pool on site:
We walk the site and pick a spot - we will use this as a base for the next 5 nights:
I can now relax knowing we have made it to our destination unscathed. Even if we have problems with the truck now, we have the time to arrange for local repair and can take a taxi or bus to visit the things we want to see.
Stay tuned for more of the Dolomites tomorrow...
Steve.
