The Road Less Traveled

Yes, the road diverged in a wood, and we took the road less traveled by (Frost).  But more of that later.  First a short summary of the day then the anecdotes.  We traveled from Slovenia through twisty roads, got lost in Cortina, found our way, and arrived in St. Ulrich/Ortisei in the Val Gardena of the Dolomites area of the Alps in the north of Italy.  That’s probably the shortest summary I have ever given.  I’m not known for being brief.

But the more fun part--the stories.  First the less interesting:  we drove right by snow as we entered the valley we are in (the Val Gardena) and saw beautiful wildflowers yesterday and today (there is a photo in yesterdays blog of the pretty wildflowers everywhere in the mountains).  

When we got to Cortina, we didn’t have a very detailed map of the city--where to turn, etc.  So, we did what I find usually works better, we followed the signs.  Well, that didn’t work either.  None of the signs had the road or towns that we needed to travel to--non even in the right direction!  After many turn-arounds and bad words, we found ourselves traveling out of town on the road that we had come in on.  So, we decided to push away the map and ignore the signs.  Instead, we knew that the road we wanted to leave on left out of the west of town.  So we took the first promising left hand turn that we could in town, always taking the left when given a choice--and you know what?  That gave us our road!  

Then, there are the shrines.  There are shrines everywhere.  Some are rather subtle.  For moviegoers that have seen Under the Tuscan Sun, there is an old man that she tries to connect with, every day he goes to put flowers in a vase at a shrine.  Some shrines are little niches in stone walls, others look like bird houses or rural mailboxes (except open in the front).  Others, however, are small buildings.  They have a painting or statue of the saint, with fake flowers or other mementoes behind glass, then candles and fresh flowers outside the glass.  They are bigger than phone booths (for those of us that remember what those looked like!), are maybe the size of a powder room (1/2 bathroom) in a house.  They are very impressive looking.

At one point on a twisty mountain road, we saw a sign for a Russian Chapel (in the middle of nowhere!).  The story is that during WWI, they used Russian prisoners of war to build a road through the mountains--a very strategic military point, evidently.  So they did, but there was an avalanche in which over 100 Russian POWs died.  So a Russian chapel was built in their memory up in the mountains along they road that they built.  Workers were working on replacing the wooden shingle siding when we were there, so we couldn’t go inside; they didn’t seem to like me walking around the outside either but they didn’t stop me.  

But, the best story is in the road less traveled.  Using Google Maps, Randy found some scenic roads for us to take through Slovenia--those were just twisty roads through the mountains.  But then came the road in Italy.  It started out two lanes, then went down to one lane, then went down to what was closer to a bike trail.  Twisting through the mountains.  We began beeping as we went around each corner, horrified that we would meet another car.  It being in the mountains, the side of the road was a retaining wall on one side and a sheer drop down on the other.  There were a few “thickenings” of the road that we found cars parked on, so we carefully went around them.  Well, just when we thought we might be safe, two bicycles.  One went way over so that his handlebars must have been scraping the retaining wall, the other seemed less comfortable biking up a mountain and was further out.  After a nearly hitting her, a logging truck came around the corner heading straight for us!  Randy started beating on the horn and he stopped short of us.  We looked at each other for a few moments, but we couldn’t really back up, we had the bicyclists just behind us, riding ever closer, so the truck backed up to a slight thickening that we could probably squeak through, then the bicyclists went around us, going slowly since it was uphill.  After waiting for them, we could go (with our toy car engine) making us race the engine so that it wouldn’t quit (like it often does).  We did just squeak by.  Then the motorcycles going around us.  Then--you’ll never believe it, so I’ve got a photo--goats!! The road was filled with goats!  (I think that may have also happened in Under the Tuscan Sun.)  We had to wait for all of them to squeeze by the car so that we could move forward!  It was so funny--we were laughing for so long afterward!  First the bicycles and the truck, then the goats!