Ski run above the clouds
Skiing this morning:
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Too busy doing important things
[i-Kronplatz]
[i-Kronplatz]
2,200m high. Clear and crips air with a small layer of new snow every night. If you want to catch up with me, you'll have to hurry and be fast:
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Rumble: Last ski pictures
Two days ago, we went up to Cortina, one hours drive from our hotel. The scenery and ski slopes were great, but it was windy and bloody cold, as you can see from the pictures:
cortina[i-cortina]
The family:
family in snow 2[i-family in snow 2]
Tine and Lana on the lift:
tine and lana on lift[i-tine and lana on lift]
Hannah on the lift:
hannah on lift[i-hannah on lift]
Is there anything else but pride a father can feel when seeing his daughters growing up, and becoming independent, adventurous, happy? Here are our two girls trying to jump higher than dad... :-)
lana jump[i-lana jump]
hannah jump[i-hannah jump]
Rumble: The Sellaronda
sella ronda 2[i-sella ronda 2]
Remember the local legend of King Laurin and his rose garden I posted last year? Well, today we went skiing very close to those mountains. We did a tour around the Sella mountain where connecting ski lifts and slopes form a circuit called the "Sellaronda". The weather was perfect, the skiing was just great. It took us just over five hours to finish the Sellaronda, including a one hour lunch.
group at sella ronda[i-group at sella ronda]
sella ronda[i-sella ronda]
Rumble: Lana on the slopes
lana jumps[i-lana jumps]
Meet Lana, 13, our oldest. A picture from this morning on the slopes of the Kronplatz, in the North of Italy.
The girls enjoy the adventure of jumping, going off the main ski piste, in between the trees...
Nuts as their dad.
Rumble: Hannah on the slopes
Hannah on the Kronplatz[i-Hannah on the Kronplatz]
This is Hannah, 10, our youngest. A picture taken this morning, on the slopes of the Kronplatz, here in South Tyrol.
Hannah learned to ski when she was two and a half. The first day she went skiing, I will never forget: We picked her up from the ski school in the afternoon, where we found her (and her ski instructor), covered with blood. She had just ran into a wooden barn on the slope, and pierced her lip. We had to rush her down the mountain, into the car, and onto the operating table of the nearest hospital where they sewed her lip under full anesthesia. Two days later, she was back on her skis.
Nuts like her dad, she is.
Rumble: The Brunico Padlock Mystery
In Brunico, a town nearby, there is a bridge over the Rienza river with hundreds of padlocks on its railing. We thought these had a romantic meaning: love pledges or "lost loves locked into ones heart".
The guy at the gas station had the answer: Up 2004, there was a military camp in Brunico where youngsters came for their military service. After finishing their tour of duty, it was a tradition to hook the padlock of their trunk to the railing, and throw the key into the river.
brunico bridge padlocks[i-brunico bridge padlocks]
brunico bridge 1[i-brunico bridge 1]
Delving a bit deeper into the "Italian padlock mysteries", revealed different connotations and other traditions:
Originally, the Italian men drawn into military service, took a lock from their home and hooked it onto a monument or a structure, as a public vow to return back home. Some say, it was a vow to return safely back to their loved one..
There is also the Roman legend that lovers will spend their lives together if they write their names on a padlock, place it on the Ponte Milvio's third lamp post and throw the key in the Tiber. (This story had a funny spin last year when Rome's Mayor Walter Veltroni introduced fines for anyone leaving a padlock on a lamp post.)
In Florence thousands of young lovers attached their padlocks to the famous Ponte Vecchio bridge. Back in 2006, the council set a team of metal cutters to work removing the 5,500 locks on the railings. It took them five months to finish, as new “lucchetti d’amore” accumulated too fast. Also in Florence, the city police has been told to slap a 50-euro fine on anyone who tries to attach a lock to the bridge.
But the issue is not confined to Italy:
The city council of Pecs in Hungary also seems to fight a loosing battle against lovers' padlocks. More of the same on the Szinva Terrace's railing in Miskolc (Hungary), Guam's "Two Lovers' Point", in Huang Shan (China), and Riga (Latvia), and Tokyo (Japan), and, and...
HELP: it seems that we have a worldwide padlock problem. Or is it a worldwide love problem?
Luckily, in Brunico, the padlock problem was resolved by replacing the enforced military draft service by a 100% voluntary force. Clever people, those Italians!
Rumble: Snowfun - Rodeln
First day of snow fun: "Rodeln":
The family:
family in snow[i-family in snow]
Hannah, our snow bunny:
hannah snow bunny[i-hannah snow bunny]
Lana, our second snow bunny:
lana[i-lana]
Figuring out how things work:
hannah and the sledge[i-hannah and the sledge]
Rumble: On the Road Again.
on the road2 28-03-08[i-on the road2 28-03-08]
on the road1 28-03-08[i-on the road1 28-03-08]
Enough of the world problems, holiday time! Today we drove from Belgium to North Italy for our skiing holiday.
Travelling is always adventure, no matter how much we travel, would you not agree? There are probably few who travel more than I do, being home for less than one month per year. And still I enjoy every moment of it. And still I get the butterflies in my stomach each time I close the door behind me, and take a step... A step on the Road to the Horizon.
Our home for the next week:
View Larger Map
Rumble: An Un-natural Mix: German and Italian...
link[i-link] How does the joke go again? Heaven is where the police men are English, the lovers are Italian, the car makers are German, the cook is French..
And hell is... (ok, will not tell the 2nd part of the joke as I do not want to insult any nationalities...)
Still, you will agree with me that the combination of Italian and German (well... Austrian) in South Tyrol is rather un-natural. Italian always being associated with the frivolous, and German with strictness... Or maybe it is a natural match, as opposites often attract.
Whatever.. It makes their roadsigns a mess.. And it upsets the lady in my GPS, as she only knows the Italian names of the towns. :-)
Rumble: King Laurin and his Rose Garden
One of the sagas from this region explains why the Rosengarten ("Rose Garden"), an imposing Dolomite chain which dominates the scenery to the west of Bolzano, glows pink at dusk.
Source: Rosengarten-Latemar Read the full post...
Rumble: South Tyrol. Wars and Skiing...
link[i-link]The area we are visiting now, is South Tyrol. In German: Südtirol. In Italian: Alto Adige, Sudtirolo or Sud Tirolo. Officially, it is called the "Autonomous Province of Bolzano-Bozen".
It lays south of the Alps, and is a part of Italy, even though everyone here has German as their mother tongue. They must be the only Italians who greet you, not with "Buongiorno", but with "Gruessgott" (translated:"Greet God"), just like in Austria.
It is a piece of land which the Italians nicked from Austria during World War I. This makes interesting history.
When Austria-Hungary, in 1914, declared war against Serbia, thus starting World War I, Italy remained neutral at first, but was soon dragged into the turmoil. The front line followed mostly the then Austrian-Italian border, which ran right through the highest mountains of the Alps. The ensuing front became known as the "War in ice and snow", as troops occupied the highest mountains and glaciers all year long. Twelve metres (40 feet) of snow were a usual occurrence during the winter of 1915–1916 and tens of thousands of soldiers disappeared in avalanches. The remains of these soldiers are still being uncovered today. The Italian "Alpinis", as well as their Austrian counterparts ("Kaiserjäger", "Standschützen" and "Landesschützen") occupied every hill and mountain top and began to carve whole cities out of the rocks. They even drilled tunnels and living quarters deep into the ice of glaciers. Guns were dragged by hundreds of troops on mountains up to 3 890 m (12,760 feet) high. Streets, cable cars, mountain railways and walkways through the steepest of walls were built.
Whoever had occupied the higher ground first was almost impossible to dislodge, so both sides turned to drilling tunnels under mountain peaks, filling them up with explosives and then detonating the whole mountain to pieces, including its defenders.
After the Austrian defeat in 1918, the Southern part of the Austrian province of Tyrol was attached to Italy, even though it was mostly inhabited by ethnic Germans, Ladins (that is Ladins, not Latins nor Latinos!) and only had a small Italian minority: South Tyrol.
link[i-link]Today, we did not mind the violent history. We just... skied! With the hope of not tripping over a frozen body of a soldier from the first World War. Or worse: being chased by a guy who did not know the first World War was over yet! Here are my girls this morning:
Rumble: And now for something different...
link[i-link] Not everything can be about climate changes, developing countries and other depressing stuff...
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[i-link] Read the full post...