Italy Dolomites, Thu Sep 15, 2022

2022/09/15 Dolomites day 4 loop SE around Dolomiti Bellunesi

Today's riding will be powered by Cappachino and jelly doughnuts

plan for today is a loop to the south east

I'm starting to doubt this Garmin GPS

The road has grass on it

Here's a good example. Google says take ss241, but Garmin says, hey I see a "shortcut" through a farmer's field. Turn down this driveway.

Shit! It's getting steep. I hope I don't drop this pristine Ducati Multistrada. That would be annoying and really embarrasing asking the farmer for help picking it back up.

OK, damnit, this GPS sucks. It will take you on the most rediculous shortcuts through town or across a farmer's field. The correct way to use this it seems is this: turn off auto-zoom, turn off automatic off-route recalculation, zoom out enough to see what is coming up, then zoom in enough to see what it is asking you do do, then ignore directions to get off the "main road". When it prompts "off route, recalculate?" either say no because you know what you are doing and will be back on the route soon enough, or stop and pull out google maps to see what is going on.

Where Tony's soda comes from ;-)

stopping for coffee and a croissant

Getting an early start on a 250km day leaves time for this. Maybe there's something to a more relaxed pace

Rural Italy

Picnic spot in Servo

I'm having absolutely perfect weather considering that the forecast was thunderstorms and lightning all day today. 98%. From what I've seen, weather forecasting in Europe is completely random.

Oh,oh! Road closed. Suddenly my day got a lot longer. The road into here was long and now I get to do it again in reverse, then find another way around this mountain.

So, well and truly closed. That excavator is digging a huge hole where the road used to be. I'm not getting through. And it's starting to rain.

Just a thought... You know a really skilled machine operator could have picked up my bike and swung it across the hole and set me on my way. But I didn't know enough Italian to make the challenge

This construction detour reminds me of a certain moment in Pecos de Europa in northern Spain.

OK, can you count the logs. There are lots of piles like this of logs drying beside the roads throughout these mountains. It's pretty cool how they stack them up.