Alps 2024 — Day 9: Sauris to Villabassa via Cortina

Surprise, surprise, today we’re going on a bike ride! There’s a certain routine to our days now. Harald and I can (and do) pack up without a word. Shared items like toothpaste, sunscreen and the good tire pump just show up where they’re needed without discussion. It’s getting hard to imagine a day where we don’t wake up in a hotel room, pack your bags the same way, eat breakfast at the hotel dining room, bike up and down a mountain pass, have lunch on the side of the road somewhere, find a hotel for the night, do a second pass, eat again (sometimes), plow ahead through the 2pm doldrums, get to the hotel, shower, charge devices, go to the grocery store, eat until you’re sick, write a blog post, go to bed. Sometimes the specific order of these things change (like today we shopped before reaching the hotel), but the broad strokes are the same.

So today we did all that! And we’ll do most of it tomorrow too!

Our hotel was about 200m up a 1000m pass, so we got to climbing immediately and it was pretty spectacular. Very little traffic because this valley we were in was extremely isolated. Enough so that they still have their own language (Saurano spoken by two hundred, or about half, of the residents) in addition to speaking Italian and Friulian.

It was a steep climb made harder by the abrupt start. Generally it takes 20 minutes or so to get your engine running so, personally I feel so much slower until I’ve warmed up. I guess that may not come as a surprise to many, but the evidence is pretty clear when you have a power meter on your bike and you’re forced to pedal quite hard from the start.

But we made it to the top and enjoyed discussions about what it must have been like for the people tasked with building these insane roads in the early 1900s.

And then down we went. Not straight down but a bit of fits and starts as there were a few plateaus. But once we hit it earnest, it could have been a fast and interesting descent. Unfortunately the road wasn’t of great quality, so we were forced to go extra slow, particularly in the switchbacks.

Once down, we began working our way along a busy valley with a series of towns, heading towards our next pass the Passo Tre Croci. The route gave us a choice between the road or a parallel trail that was sort of a chunky gravel. For most of the next 30km we were on the road, but after stopping for lunch at a national park trailhead, we made the decision to try the trail for a bit, since it would likely be more shaded (it was hot again, 87F) and would give us a break from the road traffic.

All of that was true, but in addition the trail was steeper and just required more attention than cruising along on a paved road. So we left the trail as soon as we could, but it didn’t seem soon enough at the time!

Once back on the road we stopped for a three minute espresso at a roadside restaurant and were able to get into a nice rhythm of climbing, despite the heat. Punches up to 10-12% at times but mostly less.

Photo dump!

After bagging Passo Tre Croci, we dropped down to Cortina and hooked up with the Venice-Munich long distance bike route. We’d take this for the next 35km. It was an old railroad grade so we enjoyed long, shallow climbs and descents. Unfortunately, a mix of very chunky and moderately chunky gravel kept us in our toes, along with a lot of other cyclists. Don’t these people have jobs?!? Still better than the road this time.

We booked a room in Villabassa, but stopped 5km short of there in Toblach so we could hit up a larger grocery store for dinner.

After cleaning up and doing laundry, we headed to a local restaurant and sat outside watching people play tennis while we had some beverages and maybe some french fries. Then we went back to the hotel and ate All. Of. The. Food.