Munich to Venice on a tandem, 2016: Saturday, July 16: Sorriva over the Croce d'Aune to Valdobiedenne

No GPS maps for today. I guess that I forgot to load them.

We got back to the B&B around 2100 but still not B&B guy around. We were stuffed, tired, and ready to hit the sack. So we left a not for Luciano and said that if he’s around in the morning, we’d meet him then. We both slept well after the stupid crazy campground.

In the morning Luciano was indeed home and busy making a fantastic breakfast. He was very apologetic as he had an emergency to take care of, but apologies were not needed. He is a very gracious host and he made pot after pot of fantastic Italian coffee, bread, four types of local cheeses, and everything else. Then, he asked if we would enjoy fresh salad. “Well, if you insist.” Luciano went out to his garden and picked fresh greens, cucumbers and basil, then prepared a great, simple salad that we enjoyed with aceto male (a balsamic vinegar made with apples) and fantastic olive oil.

Luciano's garden.

And garden shed

Breakfast. The best we've had in Europe for sure.

We reluctantly headed down the road. More accurately, up the road. The base of the famous Croce d’Aune climb was just a few km from our B&B and we were on the lower slopes in a few short minutes. Fortunately, the climb from this side is only about 10 km to the top. We were both a bit worried about the steepness of the climb, but we knew that we’d make it. But the steepest part we encountered was about 15% -- the rest of this west side was 10 – 12% and we’re almost used to grinding up such grades. In no time we were at the top (well, actually, it was quite a while) where we visited the monument to Tullio Campagnolo, for it was on the Croce where he conceived up his most fundamental invention, the quick release skewer.

So beautiful on the way up.

Very steep climb so early in the a.m.

The churches have a distinctly different, Roman influence

Just another switchback in the road.

And just another church

That is where we started from this morning, far off in the distance

The Croce d'Aune is so very famous in bike racing...

Recognition of Tullio Campagnolo at the summit

Tired but happy riders. Here's to GreenRidge Physio!

It was downhill all the way to Feltre, where we had to make a decision about what route to take. And was it ever downhill. We were glad that we didn’t climb the east side, as it was 17 km of 15% switchbacks. That would not have been fun at all.

In Feltre we easily decided to take an alternative route to Valdobiedenne. This required some great navigation from Lorie, and 7 km along a very fast and busy highway (though there was a decent shoulder), but we made it fine. We had about 15 km to Valdobiedenne and took a smaller road. But we were flying downhill, came around a corner and a tunnel entrance was ahead of us. Nothing to do but go for it (our red flashing taillight was on). We were flying through the tunnel at 50 kph, hoping that nobody came up from behind, and that nobody oncoming decided to pass! The tunnel was a couple of km long but we lucked out and saw daylight and flew out of the far end before even one car came up to us.

We settled into our hotel and cooled down, the rode out to the Prosecco vineyards to try the famous local wine of the same name. We found a very cool vineyard where they have food of all kinds sold on the honor system, and a vending machine for bottles of wine. We skipped the food and went straight to the wine. The machine had an electronic reader for drivers’ licenses to make sure the buyer is of sufficient age. The licenses in Europe have a chip, and it would not read mine. Luckily there was a polish guy who said that we could use his. And thus we bought a bottle of wine kind of like buying a can of coke. We had ridden 3 or 4 km to the winery and did not want to open the bottle and then ride back to the hotel, so we stuffed it into a bag and headed home.

Wine vending machine...

We were able to buy wine, with some help from a Polish friend who let us borrow his identification to prove
to the machina that we were of proper age.