May 20: Termeno to Trento

Another beautiful day. This would be the last day of being in the Austrian part of Italy. From tomorrow on, Italian will be the main language spoken (not that I'm sad about it or anything...).

We left our hotel at the usual time, a little bit before 9 AM. We rode through a number of very nice little Italian towns.

At Mezzocorona, we had to find a traffic circle in the center of town and turn left there. At the traffic circle, we found a number of the folks from our tour sipping espressos at an outdoor cafe. Of course it was that time of the morning, so we stopped too. A surly Italian cameriera took our orders and served us passable espressos and cappuccinos. (I think she was having difficulty coping with so many of us at one time.)

After finishing our drinks, Bryan, Patti, Kurt and I went up into town to see the gondola that went from the base of the town up to the top of the mountain right next to town. Bryan and Patti wanted to go up it; I thought it would be fun to watch but there was no way I was going on that thing!

The lines were long, so we all turned around to try to figure out how to get across the train tracks to the bike path at the banks of the Adige river, which we were again following.

At the RR station, we couldn't figure out how to get across. After a quick bathroom break (you have to use the toilets where you can find them..), I asked a nice man if he knew how to get across. A long conversation (in Italian, of course) ensued, and he introduced me to his son (Alberto, I think), his wife Maria, and himself (Marco). He and his family had come up from Verona for the day (by train) to ride around Mezzocorona. (It was hard to believe that we could get from where we were to Verona in an hour by train, considering we'd be there in over a week by bike (with lots of side tracking, of course)!) Eventually, he offered to show us the way!

So, Bryan, Patti, Kurt, me, Rita, Matt, Marco, Maria and Alberto (and I believe two other family members of theirs who we didn't formally meet) went a couple kilometers on a circuitous path to the other side of the tracks. There is definitely no way we could have found it ourselves!

At the end, we had a stranger take a picture of all of us, but for some reason it didn't come out on my camera (CF card full? didn't really push the button? who knows..). But Patty has a copy, so hopefully I'll get one to post soon.

We bid our goodbyes, and continued along the path to Trento.

At Trento we are staying at the Hotel Accademia, a 4-star hotel in the heart of the old city center. The rooms were reasonably big and comfortable (but not super fancy), the food wasn't really to my liking, and the staff was very nice and helpful. I would recommend it.

Trento has a very nice old historical center, with a Castle in the middle and a very nice Duomo nearby. Our room looked out onto the Duomo (through some buildings).

We visited the castle, but only part of the castle was open due to restoration. But it was still very pleasant.

There was a bike race in town that day, but we missed it.

At night, Rita, Matt, Kurt and I went to the piazza to get some gelato. We were approached for the first time in the trip by someone hitting us up for money. Of course I told him (in Italian) that we didn't speak Italian and didn't know what he was saying!

This is a city I wouldn't mind visiting again, since there is a lot to see, but we didn't have that much time to see it.