 enlarge 109KB, 800x533 1 Tuesday 2 July. 178 miles. Toblach to Meran (Morano). Hotel Therme. Great roads and passes, including the spectacular Timmelsjoch. Hard to take pics where the views were best. A series of tunnels. Colin pic.
|  enlarge 110KB, 800x533 2 Nearing the top. Colin pic.
|  enlarge 140KB, 800x533 3 At the top. Colin pic.
|  enlarge 142KB, 800x533 4 In Meran, we parked in the square behind the hotel, and 2442 attracted the usual attention. Much more interesting this time: no reporters, but two women, sportswomen themselves, who wanted to talk. This woman races horses regularly. She also loves to drive, but couldn’t imagine driving in the mountains without power brakes and power steering. Once we talked more and she sat behind the wheel, she thought she might be ale to handle it. I think she could, too.
|  enlarge 143KB, 800x533 5 This woman is a pioneer, racing cars, in Italy, in 1972. The Italian men didn’t know what to make of her. She raced under the name Barbarella, but thinks that once Jane Fonda made the movie by that name all memory of her achievements vanished.
|  enlarge 164KB, 800x533 6 Wednesday 3 July. Meran to St. Moritz via the super challenging Stelvio Pass. Suvretta House. Not a steep pass, but the Stelvio does take quite a bit of concentration to plan and execute each very tight hairpin turn, especially the ones to the right, which require using the left lane to have enough room. Colin pic.
|  enlarge 131KB, 800x533 7 Turn 3, not many more to the top. Colin pic.
|  enlarge 137KB, 800x533 8 The long view. Colin got out at a convenient spot to take this pic, and I drove 2442 to a parking place. Colin pic.
|  enlarge 126KB, 800x533 9 Ghostie-O feeling rather self-satisfied at his great achievement.
|  enlarge 180KB, 800x533 10 Thursday 4 July. Free day. Suvretta House was the ideal place for the triumphant end of the rally. The food and service were superb (even though someone kept sneaking into our room to straighten up a bit as part of the bed turning down process). We had been promised porters to help with our luggage at all of the hotels. Here they actually appeared, and there were so many, they could have spread out among all of the other hotels, and there still would have been enough. We had a walk in the nearby wildflower meadow, then into the woods.
|  enlarge 209KB, 800x533 11 A Gentian in the woods.
| |
|