Day 8: Lake Garda (Italy) –> Val Gardena (Italy)

Hotel check out and luggage loading up time, again.

This hotel had a large underground car park but always had available spaces and it didn’t charge for its use.

After leaving, we pop into a nearby eni fuel station to top up our tank. We had noticed passing it a few times yesterday that they had 98 octane petrol at very reasonable prices.

But it turns out that “this area” is not getting any deliveries of anything higher than regular 95 fuel at the moment. We’re not entirely convinced that is true, but with only 30 km left in the tank we’ve no choice but to fill up.

This station is unusual in that it has an attendant filling up the cars – never seen that in Europe before. You still have to go into the stop to pay, so not really sure what the advantage is supposed to be.

Our car was complaining that our rear left side tyre was a little low on pressure – registering 2.9 instead of the 3.0 we aimed for. Not much difference, but enough to show up a warning on the dash.

The attendant insisted on inflating all four tyres – with considerably less concern for accuracy within 0.1 bar than we apply. We paid our €10 tip and wished we’d have been let do it ourselves. 🤷

Once more, we have a gloriously warm and sunny day – despite the long-range forecast predicting rain.

We have a relatively short drive today up to The Dolomites, so decide to set our PCM to route around the autostrade and tolls and take the “rural” roads instead. In reality it follows the autostrade quite consistently.

We soon leave the lakes behind us and start to see the mountains – the Italian Alps  – ahead of us.

Where Italy takes advantage of the steep slopes to generate energy via hydroelectric electricity.

We continue to “follow” the motorway high above us. As the terrain turns mountainous, the infrastructure grows more impressive to observe.

Our minor road takes more tunnels compared to the motorway that hugs the hills. When looking at the infrastructure from here, we can understand why using the Italian autostrade costs so much.

As we get closer to our destination – every hill has a church, castle or other ancient building on it.

With alpine meadows between this hills.

We reach our destination town – Val Gardena – a little early to check into our hotel.

So we decide to do a quick spurt up a nearby pass to stretch our 911 Targa’s legs.

We didn’t know too much about this area – or research it too deeply before arriving here. We knew it should have been good for mountain passes – but we hadn’t appreciated just how good it would be.

The weather, the scenery, the perfect road surface, the relatively quiet roads and the ”Italian” attitude to speed limits – this was shaping up to be better than what we’ve experienced in Switzerland over the years.

The route also has plenty of stopping area’s – something that is often missing on these passes.

Though that does mean they are often busy with cars, cyclists and pedestrians.

We reach the summit of the pass – where there is a busy paid car park.

At this stage it is late enough in the afternoon for hotel check-in to be open, so we head down the pass back to Val Gardena.

Traffic is a little heavier than it was on the way up – not helped by duelling buses on tight turns.

We continue to stop off at the many tourist viewing spots on our way down.

We arrive back into town and pull up to our hotel – The Hotel Granbaita Dolomites.

Stats

Today we did 186 km over 4:46 hours, with an average speed of 40 km/h, consuming 14.9 litres/100 km.