Day 3 as part of our Summer Roadtrip 2018 visiting the Italian Dolomites, Lake Bled and Istria. A travel diary, if you will…

Val Di Fassa

Waking in cold sweats my subconscious had clocked before I had that this was to be our last full day in the most beautiful country on earth. Moving on to Slovenia tomorrow meant I felt an overriding urge to drink as many cappuccino’s as I could before the morning was out so I was rather pleased when Rich said his left calf wasn’t up for anymore Italian mountains today – it’d seen more hairpin bends than an arthritic hairdresser. So we decided to stay local.

Our hotel is in the Val Di Fassa – a valley between mountain ranges in the Italian Dolomites, and a very popular ski resort in the winter. What we didn’t bank on before our trip was the amount of people that’d be here in the summer too! The place is rammed. There’s one road in and one road out and at about 9am and 5pm the roads are absolutely gridlocked with folk exiting their hotels and driving to their chosen hiking destinations.

I mean, they call it hiking – I’d say it was more hiking for wusses : they take the cable car up to the peak and do a short 3 mile trail down the mountain. They need to come to the U.K. and try The Lakes or The Dales where no lifts exist and if you want the pleasure of coming down you have to go up. They may have been mocking me in my sparkly sandals and culottes but if I could say ‘big girls blouse’ in Italian…

Anyway, having seen a church steeple I wanted to photograph in a nearby town we decided to make that our base today.

Pozza Di Fassa was charming and preened just like everywhere else in this Alpine paradise but perhaps a few more locals walking their dogs and shouting friendly insults at neighbours. It’s also a gateway to the hills so we explored deeper.

Google maps said there was a lake in the hills somewhere and I’m a sucker for anything that resembles a Bombay Sapphire but alas the blue bottomed body of water remained elusive so we returned to the hotel for our own version of the clear stuff, followed swiftly by a glass of local wine sold to us kindly in the shop ‘Wine And Old Stuff’. He was disappointed to hear that the translation should’ve read ‘vintage’ and that old stuff generally applied to the one portion of lasagne encased in the sides of the freezer. Prego.

Click here if you want to read our adventures from the beginning…

Or if you’ve stumbled upon this article because you’re researching the Italian Alps, my friends over at Anywhere We Roam have written a great article about the best bits of this beautiful region – check it out!

Ciao for now…