Another long day on the road… Through the Dolomites on a backroad route described in detail by the padrone di casa, avoiding all major population centers, truck routes, carabiniere checkpoints and most of the traffic to join the highway just before the Brenner pass, then north to Innsbruck and west through Austria and Switzerland past Zurich and Basel and finally north back to Strasbourg. I had emailed our car rental guy that we’d arrive at 5:45pm (his office closed at 6), and somehow we hit it just about on the dot. In the end it would have been faster and cheaper to go north from Innsbruck to Munich and the west via Stuttgart, but we only know that _now_. Tunnel tolls and windscreen _vignettes_ cost us probably €50 that day, and the going was slow for half the day as well. What we saw of Austria and Switzerland was fairly unimpressive that day; of course we didn’t see much of either country, but the view from the road wasn’t that great - going fast through Germany would have been better. What’s more, the Austrians drive like ninnies, strictly obeying all speed limits and actually attempting to _prevent_ you from passing, and the Swiss aren’t much better. We were happy to cross the final border into France and step on it.

We had another dinner a the same low-key local place where we had eaten the first night in Strasbourg and I spent the night and walked around a bit the next morning in a light rain before catching the train up to Frankfurt and then onto my plane home. I made the most of UA first classs again with a few glasses of wine and then 8 hours sleep before landing at good old SFO.

We got up and out of Trieste fairly early in the morning, ditched a parking ticket, and drove down to Venice. There is a lot of T.I.R. (truck) traffic on that stretch as it’s the main route coming from the south and east and heading for the Brenner Pass north into Europe. I’m not sure why they don’t take the road north through Slovenia and past Villach into Austria - maybe the grade is less via Brenner? We hit Venice about noon, parked and walked through town using my old mental map to Osteria La Zucca, just around the corner and over the bridge from where Mike G and I lived for a while in the summer of 1990. It turns out they’ve been open since 1980 - and the phone was ringing steadily with dinner reservations. I was happy to see them doing so well. Lunch and an espresso and we caught the vaporetto down to the Arsenale to see what we could of the Biennale.

The main half of the exposition (the Giardini) was closed for the day, but as Liz pointed out, we couldn’t have hoped to see the whole thing in an afternoon anyhow. As it was it was all we could do to make it through what was there. There was a good piece from Bulgaria (go figure) about the IP (intellectual property) around Kalishnikov automatic rifles, and a great series of massive visual diaries by a Brazilian artist… aside from that, a lot of the usual high-concept political stuff, not really my thing. We had hoped to see something impressive in the Turkey “pavillion” to redeem our (well, Loren’s, primarily) sense of the place, but instead there were four miniature wooden shacks with IKEA furniture and small flat-screen TV’s showing scenes of poverty and a big LED sign reading “Don’t Complain”. Now that is some *deep* shit. Wow. Give me a break. Nice to see the old shipyards there on the backside of Venice though.

We bailed out about 7pm and headed north on the new autostrada towards Belluno and the Valle di Cadore. That road wasn’t there last time I headed that way - there was only the old _statale_. The highway brought us up into the Dolomites with incredible speed - an hour after we left the parking garage in Venice we were near Belluno, surrounded by peaks and valleys and in an *entirely* different place. Amazing. Since we didn’t have a detailed map of Italy, I was sort of headed for Cadore on dead reckoning, although I knew that we didn’t actually want to go _there_ per se, since Cadore sits below Cortina and is lovely but fairly developed. Luckily we spotted a promising side valley at Longarone and took a chance with Valle di Zoldo, and found a *perfect* argiturismo just as time ran out.

We asked about our feast, and the woman who ran the agri recommended a local place somehow attached to a campground that we had passed on the way into town. We washed up and zipped down there, but they were already closing up. I was so disappointed that all I could say to the poor girl was “male” (bad). She apologized, and shut the door in my face. We settled for (likely frozen) pizza at the roadside bar with some friendly locals and the carabinieri across the road doing random stops. They made us a little nervous as we got ready to leave, having downed the usual half-liter (at least) of wine and one or two digestivi, so we waited for them to flag down someone else, and then made off quickly. Ha. Bastardi!

We decided to stay another night (our last of the trip) so that we could enjoy the mountains a bit and most of all so that we could eat at the local place that had been recommended. I took a hike up towards the peaks about the village, not quite reaching them but getting up to treeline at about 2000m with an incredible view of the valley below and all the other surrounding peaks. It was a hard walk, not a ton of distance (maybe 5 miles?) but 4000+ feet of elevation up and back down, but well worth it, and boy was I hungry. We hit the spot, and I knew from the minute they rolled out the polenta wheel we were in for it good. A slab of polenta (spiced with what, I didn’t find out), beef stew, pork burgers, and then *pork tartare*. Yes, raw pork done up more or less like beef tartare, and they just asked us how many we wanted. Fried cheese? sure, bring it on. I started talking to the folks at the next table, having guessed correctly that they were up from Venice, and got us all going on the grappas. In the end I asked for and left with the grappa paddle as a souvenier, and we went home very happy that our last meal of note had been so amazingly good.

Leaving Bulgaria, we didn’t want to go back through Romania and everyone confirmed that the road back via Serbia was good, so we booked a hotel in Trieste and planned for a long day of driving. The road from Sofia to the border and from there onwards about 100 miles or so wasn’t so great, but from there on it was full-on autostrada and we made excellent time through Belgrade, across the rest of Serbia, and across Croatia back to Ljubljana. My friend Liz and I had been trading text messages to see if our trips might intersect, and we managed to rendezvous there in LJB for drinks and dinner. We showed her the cool kids bar and the excellent restaurant, where we had another (identical) Slovenia feast, and then Loren and I drove the last 120km or so to Trieste, arriving at about 2am. I’ll post more about Sofia itself in a bit…

PS: I’ve been putting together a map of the trip; it’s not quite done yet, but you can check it out here: http://maps.google.com/?mid=1185862802. Photos are gradually being uploaded here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bdwelle/sets/72157600934673287/

I think I just figured out what happened to Pearl Jam. After their career fell flat in the US, they realized that since the Italians love cheesy pop rock, their best strategy was simply to learn Italian and attempt to become the next Zucchero. Unfortunately for us the void they had occupied was quickly filled by whatshisname, Dan Robinson? Right, Dave Matthews. And what a void it is. I can’t wait for him to learn Italian too. Please.