The Real Riding Begins
I woke up at 6am, and the weather outside looked great. When I woke up again at 8, it was very foggy but thankfully dry. Had a nice breakfast in the dining room of various breads, and we packed up to go.
Breakfast at the Pontives
My balcony
There were 2 helicopters making low runs nearby the hotel
That's one way to travel
We gassed up during the quick ride through St. Ulrich, and then followed the sign for our first ‘official’ pass, Passo Sella.
Wow!
This was like Disneyworld for bikers. 12 hours ago we were slogging it through the cold, wet autostrada, getting lost and being generally miserable. Now the sun was shining, it was a pleasant 50 degrees, and we were bending the bikes through glorious curves on perfect pavement with spectacular scenery. What a difference a few miles make!
Our first real look at the Dolomites
Bikes were everywhere. Solo riders, groups of 2 or 3, packs of 10 or 20, everyone heading up and down the pass. I found no shame in letting a large group of sport riders zip past us as we started to get our Alpine sea legs. We stopped for some pictures on the way up, and I could hardly get my helmet off over my ear-to-ear grin.
Cool, our first Rifugio!
The Dolomites are just gorgeous
A very happy Jim
The RT's bars cradled my helmet perfectly
It was great having bike-to-bike communication as we would our way up the hairpins to the summit. Whoever was in the lead would warn the guy behind of what’s coming around the often-blind hairpins. “Truck coming down”, etc. We continued a little further and got to the top of the pass, which was very easy to spot since there were about 50 bikes parked up and a couple of gift shops/restaurants. There were all kinds of bikes up there – old Guzzis, a new Griso, a Rocket III, Ducati 998, and BMW GS’s by the dozen.
Passo Sella
These guys were just off the road
Quite a view
Who needs a kickstand? It only adds weight.
Stunning Dolomites
Eye candy
This guy sounded great
Griso!
Me at the summit of Passo Sella
From Sella we continued to Passo Pordoi, which instantly became our favorite (and we hadn’t even done the best part of it yet). Big views, perfect pavement, everything from fast sweepers to super-tight hairpins (or tornantes), this road had it all. Passed lots of bicyclists going up and down the pass, I have enormous respect for those guys.
The summit of our favorite pass (so far)
When we got to the top of the pass there was a Porsche car club just pulling in. About 15 911’s of various type, with most of the owners and their wives wearing matching yellow jackets. A quick glance down the line of cars and then something caught my eye – wait a second, that’s not a 911!
The Porsche club
Holy crap! Never seen a Carrera GT in person before
We picked up a Passo Pordoi pin at the gift shop, something we would try to do at each pass. We walked around for a while, taking it all in.
Belgarda Bulldog? Anyone know more about these?
The road we had just come up
Couple of very happy guys
Finishing the ride down to Arabba on Passo Pordoi, we found motorcycling heaven. Perfect pavement (this was becoming a trend), 29 tornantes (hairpins), incredible views, and bikes, bikes, and more bikes.
At one point on the way down I heard a loud snarl through the headset, and looked ahead to see a train of Ferrari’s coming up the pass at speed. Like the Porsche club at the summit, I assume this was another car club out for a Sunday ride. At the tail end was a Lamborghini Gallardo. I’ve seen Ferraris before, but never really seen them being driven in anger. These guys were racing through the gearbox on the straights, and sliding the back end around the tornantes. Which sounds really cool, except when you’re making the downhill left-hander around the outside and there’s the ass-end of a 360 Modena sliding around the inside, a foot or two from your knee. Sounded great though. A Porsche following them up went wide on a tornante and really got my attention.
Had no problem finding the Hotel Mesdi, as they’re situated on the last tornante of Passo Pordoi. Fantastic location for a hotel! There was some confusion as to our rooms – when I booked them I got 2 double rooms, so they were expecting 4 people. They tacked on 15 euro to our room rate and we kept our double rooms. The woman at the desk, who I believe is part of the family that owns/runs the hotel, could not have been nicer. We unpacked our bikes and get settled in the rooms before heading out for lunch.
The Hotel Mesdi, with it's very own tornante
Tornantes are fun when bikes are coming the other way....
...not so much when busses are
A short ride into town (less than 1 minute) and we passed a café with a dozen or so bikes parked outside – looks like our kind of place. Got a curbside table and looked at the menu. Hmm, nothing I recognized as something I normally eat. After some agonizing, I settled on a “speck and cheese on baguette”, which turned out to be delicious. Speck is sort of a south Tyrolean smoked bacon. The weather turned nasty during lunch, alternating between clouds, wind, rain and hail. After a dessert of chocolate gelato we headed back to the hotel to wait an hour and see what the weather brings.
Caffe Peter, our stop for lunch
My Speck and Cheese sandwich
The view from my room
A very nice room with a great view
My very own alarm clock
Passo Falzarego
Passo Giau
Why does the sound of children playing outside your window sound so much better in Italian? While we waited in our rooms for the weather to clear up there were a couple of kids playing soccer outside the hotel and it was great just listening to them. I called home to see how things went at my son’s soccer tournament, and was delighted to hear that they tied their arch-rivals (Millville). He was so excited!
The weather was clearing so I took the camera and went for a walk up the hill from the hotel. Had fun shooting bikes going around the tornanti, then met Jim by the bikes. By the time the sun was shining and the roads were starting to dry up, so it looked like our delay was a good idea.
The weather was improving
Beginning our trek to Passo Falzarego
We headed East out of town heading for Passo Falzarego. On the way we passed through the narrowest town I’d ever seen (wish I wrote down what it was, possibly Livinallongo del Col di Lana (wow, that’s a mouthful)), basically a paved alleyway between buildings on each side.
Out of the corner of my eye I spotted a castle in the near distance, and we managed to find a road that looked like it led to it. We got as far as a deserted dirt road and a sign in Italian before deciding to turn back and continue up the pass.
Wish we could have gotten closer
Some great tornanti on the way up the pass, leading up to a great section with a tunnel. Not just any tunnel though, this one had a tornante in the middle of it! I had Jim go up first so I could get some good shots of it, then headed through it myself. Definitely an engineering solution I’ve never experienced before.
The hairpin tunnel on Passo Falzarego
Jim heading in
The cablecar to the clouds
Chapel at the summit
Should be a fun ride down
One of the mohawk boys was riding this gorgeous XJR1300
Jim posing on the way down
Coming into Cortina d'Ampezzo. You can just see the ski jump on the right edge of town.
Looks like a BMW ad
Plenty of twists and turns on the way down the other side leading to Cortina d’Ampezzo. Cortina is much larger than Arabba, with a large central shopping area and lots of high-end shops and restaurants. There was also a fair bit of traffic on the one-way streets through town. We were trying to find Passo Tre Croci, but ended up heading south about 8 kms out of town. Once we realized we had missed it, we switched bikes and I led the way on the GS back to Cortina to try again. I was loving the light and nimble feel of the GS after swinging the RT around all day. We got lost again, and found ourselves heading south out of town again.
Beautiful church in the center of Cortina. Perfect landmark for us, as we went past it several times
Jim admiring the architecture
And then we had a bit of an adventure. I was leading, and didn’t want to go down the same wrong road out of town again. I spied a small road to the right that looked good, so I said over the Q2 “making a right”, and whipped the GS onto the side street. What looked like an innocent right turn was actually about a 120 degree tight bend that immediately descended down a steep hill. OK, tight but not too crazy. Maybe 30 yards later there was another right turn, which I prepared to roll through.
Over the headphones I hear “crap I almost dropped it”. To which I reply “you OK?”, and I get back “nope”, or something similar. By this time I had made the second right, so I pulled over and waited a second to see if Jim showed up. He didn’t. I made a quick U-turn and went back to the 2nd right turn so I could see up the street we came down. I was fearing the worst at this point, expecting to see Jim and the RT laying down in the street. But there was nothing there. No bike, no Jim, no nothing. I didn’t know what to do at this point. He was out of intercom range, and nowhere in sight. I waited a couple minutes, nothing. OK, maybe he made a left at the end of the street instead of the right. I went up the road in that direction for a km or so. Nothing. Backtrack to the 2nd right turn and pull over and wait. I have to say I was feeling fairly panicky at this point, repeatedly calling for him over the headset. It was like a scene in an airline disaster movie – “Flight 22, come in please, flight 22, over, come in please flight 22”
I was immensely relieved when after only a few minutes Jim rolled up, safe and sound. Turns out he didn’t make the first turn onto the side street, so had to get back to it. Cortina being a maze of one-way streets, he had quite a loop to make to get back to our position. Whew. He did make it clear he didn’t care for the RT at all in tight quarters. We switched bikes and headed back once again into Cortina to try to find signs for Passo de Croci.
Which we didn’t, so we settled for Passo Giau. There was a little bit of rain as we wound our way through the woods and up the pass. We stopped for some action shots when the weather cleared. Giau had a very remote feel, very different than Sella and Pordoi. Eventually the road turned into tornante after tornante, and then we found ourselves at the summit. Chatted with a couple of guys from Germany, one on a K12RS and the other driving a Toyota MR2. They snapped our pic, and commented that they thought the view from the summit would be nicer.
Passo Giau
Playtime!
Jim coming up Giau
Another BMW promo
We made it to the top
The view from the top of Passo Giau. The Germans were disappointed.
Man we're having a good time
The rifugio at Passo Giau
29 tornanti later and we were down in Selva di Cadore. The hairpins were turning out to be much easier than either Jim or I had feared. I guess when you talk to people about the Alps, or watch some of the youtube videos, they all talk about how incredibly tight the hairpins are. While you certainly need to respect them, it’s not really that hard. You learn to really look all the way through the turns at the next section of straight road (either that or you crash). It was like a boot camp for turning skills. By the end of a couple of passes, you have learned what it takes to get around really tight turns.
We got back to the Hotel Mesdi just in time for the dinner that we missed yesterday. Our very cute waitress (who we learned later was from Hungary) informed us we were currently the only guests in the hotel. More folks were expected tomorrow, but for now everything was just for us. The salad bar was OK, but the spaghetti carbonara (with bacon and eggs in it) was not for me. The Caprese with buffalo mozzarella and fresh tomatoes was heavenly though. Jim was not thrilled with his fatty leg of pork, but we both devoured the “pineapple milefoil cake with chantilly cream” dessert. I tried to speak what little Italian I knew with the waitress, and she appeared to enjoy my efforts. There was a very cute little girl helping her, perhaps 5 or 6, and she was fun to try to talk to.
Tonight's menu
All to ourselves
Not my favorite
Mouth-watering
Mmmm...
After dinner we rigged up the RAM mount for the video camera and made some adjustments to the bike.
I have to give special thanks here to “Dave the Hero”. When we picked up the RT we had intentions of switching bikes between us, so we had them put the seat on the lowest setting (one of us is not quite as long in the leg as the other). We should have paid more attention when they did this back in Oberentfelden. With this low seat height, I was finding the RT rather cramped. The long ride on the first day on the autostrada was actually painful, and even the pass-bagging today was uncomfortable.
My friend Dave back in the states has an R1150RT, his friend has an R1200RT, and, perhaps more importantly, he has access to the internet – which we did not. I called Dave earlier and left a message, and while we were fiddling with the video RAM mount he called back and walked us through the (simple once you know it) procedure to change the seat height. With the seat back in it’s highest position the RT felt like it should – nice and roomy. THANKS DAVE!
After that, back to our rooms for a good night’s sleep. We’ve got quite an ambitious day planned for tomorrow – 10 passes. We’ll see how that goes.
Map for the day
