Leaving Venice, and climbing.

So that was Venice. The ride in the gondola, though expensive (A$160 for 40 minutes) was a great way to conclude the experience. We’d spent the day trippin’ across the lagoon to the small island of Burano, famous for its lace (meh) and colourfully painted buildings – kind of a mini Venice – and it was almost a spur-of-the-moment decision to jump in a gondola on our return. But we did, and it was great. I was a little reluctant to do the gondola thing from in front of St Mark’s, the busiest part of Venice (think queues of people 40 minutes long to get into the Basilica – we didn’t), but even around there the difference between the calles (streets) and the canals was chalk and cheese. You can hardly walk past the souvineer shops, but drifting under the bridges looking up at the rubbernecking tourists was almost sublime in its calmness. I knew then what all the people we’d been seeing in gondolas had been thinking as we’d stared down at them from bridges. “Ahhhh’, just about sums it up, though there’s likely a thought or two cast towards a time not so long ago, before the motorboat, when gondola was the only way to travel. Casanova, Marco Polo and Lord Byron weren’t so clueless afterall…

But the Vaperetto tickets were validated (bonk!) one more time as we travelled an encore length of the Grand Canal with our bags on our final morning. Cast once again into the world of the car, ours was lime green! I’d booked a Peugeot 407 wagon, “or equivalent” – and that’s what we got. A Fiat “Qubo” – kinda like a delivery van, passengerised. But neat in its own very Italian way. The boot is too small, and in a land of Audis and Mercs it screams TOURIST. But we slapped the gps on the windscreen and following its instructions we made it onto the Autostrada, heading north.

There’s always something a bit funny about driving in another country. Some are easy, like England and New Zealand. All you need to do is find the unwritten local rules and kinda stick to them. Add the wrong side of the road and things change a bit – then there’s changing manual gears (not for a while) with the wrong hand, and working out how to use the tollways (take a ticket when you get on, pay when you get off) or the automatic petrol stations. It’s all a bit of a learning curve – and 130kmh speed limits, no shoulders, Polish/Austrian/German/Belgian/etc trucks all colour the canvas as we travelled north over the Veneto flatlands.

But then a mountain heaves into view. Wow. Big. And another. And a tunnel, and suddenly we’re in a glacial valley with snowcapped peaks on each side, lakes to the right, hillside villages to the left – and poor old me, stuck with my eyes on the afore mentioned trucks and shoulders, etc. Soon enough, though, we were off the Autstrada and, having chosen a mid- Dolomites GPS destination, winding up some smaller roads, getting smaller by the minute.

You know the Tour de France? When they get to the mountain stages and the roads are narrow and tight, the hairpins numbered, the panorama spectacular? It don’t end at the border! Au contraire! The Dolomites are something to behold. The peaks are magnificent stone bluffs, thrusting hundreds of meters up out of what would be impressive mountains in their own right, but here just foothills, or entrée for the main event. And nestled among the green green fir trees, village after village of fairytale houses – we are within a yodel of Austria here, so much so that most of the signage is in both Italian and Austrian/German.

We stopped for lunch at random restaurant #987 – and it was great, despite neither they nor us sharing a common language – chips for the kids and antipasti with coffee for the grownups. Then off again, and suddenly we’re seeing skiers, not just beside the road, but next to us – above and below us, as we climb one of the major passes (that I think the Giro does in less than a month). Imagine if the Alpine Way climbed all the way up through Thredbo to the top, switch backing up the Supertrail. That’s exactly how it was, bar the thousand-foot cliff faces in every direction, then the 27 hairpins on the way back down into the valley on the other side.

Amazing.

If we’d not been stopping for a “Kodak moment” every 2km, we’d have probably made it into Bolzano sooner than we did – in fact we should probably have stopped in one of the postcard perfect ski towns for the night, instead of ending up in a too-expensive Best Western. At least they had parking and a nice view of Bolzano’s Gothic Cathedral. We were reamed over dinner too – but that’s just one of those things now.

Breakfast, on the other hand rocked. I had strudel.