The Dolomites

Buon Giorno,

The same day we visited Verona (see last post), we headed off for our rendezvous with "the Karloffs" (John, Sarah, and Lucy) in the Dolomites, otherwise known as the Italian Alps, and began our week of travel with them. The family voted, and of the places we visited, our stay in the Dolomites was the consensus favorite destination on the “Karloff tour”.

The first couple of nights, we stayed in a little villa and did a short hike in the neighboring mountains in the rain, and a longer “nature walk” (John was especially busted by the kids for using this term – my suggestion -- for the four or five hour hike) in the mountains.

In the surrounding little villages, the homes are charming with colorful flower boxes -- about what you'd expect for the Alps.

Here are the kids picking raspberries and strawberries on our first hike. Bob, Sarah, John and I were ineligible to eat any of these berries because we didn't pick enough of them. But unfortunately for the kids, the berries fermented before they remembered to eat them.

These photos are from our second day “nature walk”. Even for a group of Coloradans used to beautiful mountain ranges, the Dolomites are spectacular.


In the Dolomites, John, Sarah and Lucy’s Italian certainly came in handy as there isn’t a whole lot of English spoken. That can be problematic at times ... if you were me, would you go in the bathroom door marked “Signori” or “Signore”?

After the Dolomites, we continued with the Karloffs on a culinary tour through the Fruili region, including Udine, Cormons and Trieste. Here are Anna, Tommy and Lucy outside of Al Cappello (a restaurant recommended by the Frasca team in Boulder) in Udine.

And here is Sarah, as she and I labored mightily to load the cars outside of Cormons. Yes, that's Bob and John at the table in the background.

Just to emphasize the point, here are Bob and John while Sarah and I worked.

And here is the coastline by Trieste, which is very near the Slovenian border, and was a city long under Austrian rule.


Ciao,
Kim