Saturday 1 June 2023
Quite annoying departure from Palazzo Valmarana Braga. We took one load of luggage down the road to the car at 9ish… and came back to find that the cleaner had already come in, had assumed that we’d “left” the rest of our luggage (it was moved to the office) and had thrown away the two or three bits and pieces Maureen had left out on the table. Stupid cow.
Moving the wine from Soave and Prosecco from Tim & Nessa’s hire car to ours was a good game of Jenga and reinforced something we need to keep thinking about carefully: for the next week we absolutely cannot park the car for any length of time in the sun. Neat challenge. Watch this space.
So now we’re off to the mountains! It’s astonishing how suddenly the Dolomites rise up from the flat plains, like some child’s drawing of mountains made real. When I compare the Dolomites to other mountain ranges I’ve been in, I actually think it’s the valleys that grant them their enormous scale. The valleys are huge – you can fit entire towns into them – and so the peaks that rise above them on all sides just dwarf everything and look simply titanic.
We find a wilderness valley (Val di Canali) with hiking trails for a walk after lunch and take the trek up to Rifugio Treviso, along the bank of a glacial river and then into the woods. In books the rifugios are described as mountain huts, but up close they look more like small hotel-restaurants in the middle of the wilderness and genuinely seem like nice places to stay (if you don’t mind dormitories).
Anyway, just as we stop for a well-earned cold drink at Rifugio Treviso it started raining and within five minutes it was pouring. So the second hour of our walk back to the car was a complete soaking. At least we packed waterproofs and backpack covers.
Maybe even worse than the rain, there’s now so much cloud and its so low in the valleys that we don’t get to see the full mountain vistas on the rest of our drive to Hotel Albe. And the forecast is for more of the same over the next few days! Three weeks of heatwave and blazing sun, and now that we’re ready to do some mountain hiking the forecast is cloud and rain… let’s say we spent the evening trying to maintain a positive mood.
Hotel Albe is very homely. I’d swear it was only refurbished a couple of years ago, based on the tiling and fittings in our bathroom and the crisp paintwork on all the walls, and yet the whole scheme – from patterned carpet to wooden ceiling – is like an AI-generated image for the prompt “budget Alpine hotel circa 1970”!
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