The Hotel Clara's rate included breakfast, which I quite enjoyed. My usual travel mode is to have a reasonable breakfast, skip lunch and have a good evening meal. Among other things, this avoids the desire to have a nap mid afternoon while lunch is being digested.
The view from my balcony, showing part of Hotel Clara, and looking up towards the Brenner Pass. The hotel had one interesting architectural feature. The door onto the balcony operated in two modes; the first is the traditional hinged on one side; the second was for use as a windown, with a hinge action at the bottom, and the top of the door swinging down into the room. I presume this was for ventilation, but there was no explanation about operation.
The Aprilia sitting in the morning sunshine, ready to leave. Just visible in the photo is the church steeple from the little town on the hill, St. Andra. My journey today started by heading for St. Andra, which required heading back into Brixen to find a somewhat obscure road out of town and up the mountain.
Nearing St. Andra, there was a bus stop, so I pulled in to have a look over the valley. As you can see, the air was no clearer today than yesterday.
Since I have not been taking many photos, a panorama shot seemed in order. This is overlooking Bressanone/Brixen. On the far right you can see the church spire shown above. The hotel was on the northern end of town, probably roughly behind the power pole in the middle.
From St. Andra it was on to Wurz Joch along a beautiful road running along the sides of hills at times, offering excellent views across green valleys.
Then it heads into more moutainous (!) territory, with little view of the valleys far below. And what mountains they are - very sharp, which implies they are new (on the geological scale).
The gap in the middle is my fault - the camera can be storing one photo while taking the next; however, when taking many in quick succession (as with a panorama) you have to wait for it to catch up. The missing bit is where I didn't wait! And the individual images have quite different illumination - some of the shots were looking directly into the sun. I suspect that camera has an exposure lock mode - that solves the issue the "proper" way.
There were people working in the field, cutting grass by the looks of it. It also reminded somewhat of "The Sound of Music", expecting to hear Julie Andrews any minute now...
The journey continued on to the town of St. Martin, then to Corvara, over Passo Campolongo to Arabba, the Passo di Falzarengo to Cortina d'Ampezzo, where I stopped to plan the next set of passes. While it would have been very enjoyable just to ride back the way I had come, there are far too many roads to explore than that!
Cortina is another of those confusing towns. The middle part of town is a large roundabout, due to a series of one way streets. As a consequence, I could not find the way I had come in, but did find A way out. This was not the planned route, but I decided to stick with it anyway. This went over Passo Tre Croce, enjoyable but not especially memorable. Eventually I ended up back in Brixen, but it was mostly along a very busy road, with many trucks. Not quite what I had in mind!
Italy In July
