From our campsite in Austria we could see some amazing craggy mountains in the distance, away down the end of the enormous valley. (Everything is enormous in the Alps region.) A quick search, courtesy of the campsite’s wifi, revealed that they were indeed the Dolomites that Rod seemed to think they might have been.
So we drove on through the neat and ordered Austrian townships toward those towering lumps of bare rock that jutted rudely up from the valley floor. The Dolomites lacked the crumbling shale scree slopes that were so common through much of the Alps that we had encountered to that point, they were sheer and bare rock that the trees could barely gain a toe-hold in. Considering the name of them, we figured they were mostly forms of limestone and marble (which is, after all, simply metamorphosed limestone) which is not prone to crumbling and forming scree slopes. The huge cliffs that reared skywards shone an amazing pale cream colour, with plenty of cracks, caves and crevices giving them a varied and interesting texture.
Once again, Georgie the amazing navigatrix, found us some incredibly twisty roads that wound their way up into the heights of these astounding monoliths. We kept shifting our path as she located yet more convoluted trails full of hairpin bends and switch backs.
Eventually we found ourselves negotiating an almost impossibly narrow (for Ebenezer) and meandering mountain trail that took us ‘way up into the incredible heights of an off-season ski area that only motor bikes, healthy cyclists and other loonies dared to venture into. We tested Ebenezer’s abilities to the point where we needed to make three point turns just to get around corners. Finally, thwarted by a tunnel that was 50cm too short for our gallant motorhome to squeeze through, we had to turn around and attempt to go back the convoluted way that we had come.
At this point Ebenezer’s on-board computer went on strike and the whole vehicle shut down on a hair-pin bend, blocking the narrow road. Uh oh. Who ever thought of putting plurry computers in control of vehicles in the first place? What a stupid idea!
OK, well the golden rule with stoopid ‘pootas is that when they have a conniption turn them off, walk away for a bit, then come back (after fuming for a little while) and turn them back on again. At this point Georgie logically got out and walked off to the side, smart lady that she is.
The upshot of it all is that Ebenezer decided to start working again and we very slowly made our way back down the mountain in search of a quiet and level camp site. Another exciting adventure indeed to add to our list.
