Time for an admission of sorts: I love to travel, but I’m a bit lazy about it. Although my tickets are often booked well in advance,I tend to wait until the last minute to make plans for my journey. That’s mostly worked great and that’s what I like – I like being able to freewheel a trip, without having to check a bunch of things off of a list and watch the clock.
I try to read ahead a little and identify the things that are most important to me, and then I make a broad plan. But I also value flexibility, so if it’s raining I don’t want to be locked in to a trip to Pompeii, for example (which is all outdoors). Truly, during my vacations I want to be able to do my thing when I’m ready for it.
The exceptions to this arise when I have very specific activities in mind, such as scuba diving or safari, and then I often hand the planning off to others.
Because I travel in the off season I frequently get away with a freer approach to planning – it’s usually not too difficult to get tickets to things such as sites or events, and they are sometimes less expensive. But the other side of that coin is I sometimes arrive at a destination to find things closed unexpectedly.
Today, for instance, P and I decided to be flexible and gave up on the side trip to Bolzano. We both agreed that it didn’t make any sense. We had originally intended to do a brief hike here in Cortina d’Ampezzo before the trip there, and then maybe go there for a hike afterward. We would spend the night and have another brief hike in Bolzano tomorrow morning before boarding the train to Bologna. This sounds great but was a lot of travel, and since it takes 2 hours to get to Bolzano from here, we wouldn’t really have had enough time there. Plus the entire day is forecast for rain tomorrow. We had planned poorly, but fixed it and just cut out Bolzano.
But we also saw the downsides of this approach during this trip. P and I had initially considered working with an organizer, but they were booked up for the week (we had waited too long).
Then we decided it would be easy to arrange things ourselves, but we also didn’t want to rent a car, which left us with either hiking near town or looking for a driver, which wouldn’t have been easy at this juncture.
The infopoint in the center of Cortina, where we might easily find a local guide was closed, so we spent most time afoot.
None of this was really bad, but just limiting.
Today we found an easy loop hike from town into the hills northeast of the city.
It was a good hike, but not a great hike.
The paths were mostly gravel roads, without needing to climb over things. This may be good or bad depending on your point of view, but for me it’s less fun.
Finding this old bunker was admittedly interesting, though. I suspect it dates to WWI, but there were no signs to indicate age.
There were plenty of trails diverging off that tempted us. I wondered where they went and where they might lead us.
And at one point our trail had been washed out (but has since been remade).
Further up the hill, the view overlooking the town was absolutely incredible, and well worth the time.
On the way back down, we were promised a rifugio where we might have a meal, but it was closed for the season (we knew this might be an issue, but most of our reading indicated the rifugios close in October, not September).
And the trail guide indicated this hike would take us past el Brite de Larieto, but it didn’t (and in any case they are closed on Wednesday).
We did enjoy seeing this herd of sheep, goats, and donkeys, however.
And some hens.
And at the end of our hike of 9.5 miles with 2,057 feet of elevation gain, we found ourselves back in town having a simple delicious pork sandwich and beer at a smoky bar (there is still a lot of smoking here), talking over our day and our plans for tomorrow.
It may not have been perfectly planned, but it was beautiful.
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