What today ate we?: July 2016

Sunday, July 31, 2016

Saturday, July 30, 2016

After starting at Berggasthof Plätzwiese, we did a beautiful hike to Refugio Sennes. After a good night's sleep, our plan was to continue on to Rifugio Fanes. Despite asking them three times, they (extremely politely) refused to give us a bed for the night. So after a good enough hike already from Sennes to Fanes, we had no choice but to continue another 10km (and another 700m up and down again) to Rifugio Scotoni.

This was perhaps a little bit long.

F was so tired he almost threw up, but the fact that we had our own personal shower adjacent to our room made up for a lot.

The next day was another long-ish day with a total of 1300 meters of climbing because we remembered that we did not like the earlier hut we passed, Rifugio Lagazuoi, very much in 2008. So instead we headed on to Giussani (which we visited, but did not sleep at, in 2008). The setting was as spectacular as we remembered, and the hut was friendly and not overrun by day-trippers smelling of soap -- a big plus in this part of the Alps.

The next day, we hiked to our favorite hut from our previous trip, Rifugio Nuvolau.

It was very crowded on the way up, but the crowds died down quickly when these clouds came in.

The sunsets in the Dolomites are really spectacular, even with oncoming thunderstorms.

Not long after we took this pic to advertise our awesome dentist in Billsburg, my hair started feeling weird. At first, I thought it was an insect, just like I thought that the weird buzzing sound we heard was a dying bee.

It turned out to be the electricity in the air just prior to a lightning strike. Whoops. Perhaps we should have gone inside a little bit sooner than we did.

And yes, they still made awesome fried eggs with bacon for breakfast in the morning!

Friday, July 29, 2016

Dolomiti Revisited

After the conference in Rome had ended, we quickly did our laundry (or at least, the bastards at the laundromat near Vatican city pretended that our laundry had been washed) and headed towards the Dolomiti to start our yearly hike.

We started at a different hut than 8 years ago, to follow the route that Ellen and Christiaan did with SNP in 2007. Because we had been too busy (lazy) to plan our hike this year, we were planning to just follow their route and then to some of the huts from 8 years ago.