To the Dolomites we go

In which I have the new best day of my life.

Day 6 - Venice to the Cortina d’Ampezzo

Our alarm goes off early. We have set it as such to have first crack at our hotel-included breakfast and we are tired, dragging ourselves up like a couple of corpses rising from the grave. Again, we did not sleep. I close my eyes and pray for rest, sometime. Not now. Now we have breakfast. But please, tonight. Please please.

The breakfast is abundant and strange, full of canned fruits in light syrup, prunes, a make your own pancake station that takes roughly five minutes to make one silver dollar sized pancake, a lot of soggy looking meats, some hard boiled eggs, large vats of shredded carrots, sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, and a trough of pickled onions and cauliflower. There is vegan cake so I am happy. There are a lot of strudels. There are also baked beans, which fills ML with glee. I have never loved anything as much as ML loves baked beans. I hope to someday find such joy.

With the jetlag, we’ve been asleep during at least one meal every day and then awake at 2 in the morning. At this buffet, I eat as much as I can. I eat 3 pieces of cake and a bunch of eggs and canned fruit and shredded carrots and as many silver dollar sized pancakes as I have the patience to make. I drink orange juice and grapefruit juice and apple juice and coffee. I take a couple of apples in my fanny pack and packets of crackers to line my pockets. I am full, but for how long?

We board the Cortina Express, a bus from the Venice train station to Cortina d’Ampezzo. In Cortina we will meet a representative from Dolomite Mountains to get our maps and a quick run down of the hike. We start walking tomorrow and I can’t wait.

A fact: I love being in Venice for about two hours, and then I want to leave. It is an area both completely reliant and semi-ruined by tourism, a place that is so deeply special and magical but then there are the pickpockets and the throngs of people and this time around (I’ve been once before) a lot of really intense radiating heat.

Leaving Venice feels great. The further we get from the city, the more rolling pastoral hills I see, the more meandering the path, the better I feel. At first.

Climate change has deeply affected the areas in and around the Dolomites. Recent rains have brought instability to the mountain sides surrounding the main road to Cortina. This created a landslide right in the middle of it- which means that our big bus is destined to climb to Cortina on narrow, rolling back roads.

I don’t get car sick often, but this destroys me. The bus hurtles around tight corners in narrow lanes as fast as is reasonable, and still we are an hour late. I would have chosen to be two hours late, three hours late, four hours late— to not feel like the green I’m-gonna-barf emoji, but no one asked me! I spend the bus ride with my eyes closed, Imagining looking at a bulls’ eye right on the middle of my forehead. Four hours later, we emerge. I think I might puke, but we have business to attend to.

Clutching our heavy packs and our duffel bag, we walk, hugging the main road up to our hotel. I count my footsteps to focus on anything but my nausea. Eventually, we arrive.

The woman who runs Hotel Da Beppe Sello is wearing mom jeans in a mom-way not a cool-way. She has a white baby tea with a teddy bear on it. The teddy bear is holding a flag that says U!S!A!. Her blond hair is a severe circle, and her accent is distinctly Bavarian. At first I think she hates us, but then I decide that’s just how she talks.

Sometime before Cortina, the scenery began to look more Austrian than Italian- white buildings with brown trim, windows lined with boxes full of tulips. Raw wood ceilings and curved clay tile roofs. I don’t know a damn thing about architecture but I love noticing the strong differences between Rome, Venice and Cortina. Our hotel is a perfect example of exactly that. Hotel Da Beppo Sello is is an Austrian dream.

We collapse into two twin beds pushed together, unable to believe we are here, unable to believe we have to do anything but sleep. I am starving, predictably, again and we head downstairs to the hotel lobby to eat and order caprese salad, pizza, and prosecco. I am slamming Lactaid and doing my best with dairy but I am in pain. I really thought if I could get over my aversion to eating dairy, I would be fine. I didn’t actually imagine that it might hurt physically as well as psychically.

I eat what I can through my nausea, and then the best part of the day happens: we meet our trip guide.

The run down of our trip includes many notable things, but my favorite is getting to nerd out about the Dolomites with someone who hikes them daily for her work. Eleana is fun and kind, she gives us a play by play of our next five days breezily, with lots of information peppered in about the best Rifugi for lunch, the best 360 views, which peaks will have more trail than snow.

An hour of conversation flows smoothly, and I am both exhilarated and exhausted. Understanding the logistics of our hike takes the last of of my brains power, and when we stumble upstairs it’s official: tomorrow we hike, but today we sleep.

(It is here that I must say - While I slept, ML painstakingly spent hours re-creating our paper maps in Gaia so that we may have digital copies on our hike. BLESS A CAPRICORN!!! I can’t imagine having the fortitude, but she can. That’s one of many reasons that I love her.)

Day 7 - Cortina D’ampezzo to Le Dolomiti

The alarm goes off and our room is an explosion. Last night, too exhausted to pack our bags, we decided to save it ‘til morning. The morning came quickly though, and it’s just as overwhelming now as it was then. Damnit.

We pack, and we pack quickly, which pleases me. We will be leaving our shared duffel behind at the hotel, where we will end our hike and carry the rest of our stuff on our backs. Before we hike, we get the breakfast buffet.

The breakfast buffet is served to us by young Austrian women in traditional Austrian dresses, outfits that I can only describe as lady lederhosen. We eat croissants with powdered sugar, omelets, medium boiled eggs, almond cappuccinos, quiche, orange carrot juice and apple sauce. I am thrilled with the abundance. I absolutely love to eat.

Our driver to the trailhead picks us up and is friendly, excited to tell us about the upcoming Olympics. Cortina will host the bobsled, alpine skiing and curling. Last time the Olympics were hosted here he drove the athletes around and between pointing out waterfalls on our drive, he tells us about his excitement to do so again.

At our trailhead, the air is thin and there are abundant Italian cows. These cows are somehow significantly more beautiful than American cows - probably because they all have gently clinging bells around their necks. We see two horses, one a baby rolling on his back. I have planned this for months and I am still astonished that we are here.