I could have spent a couple more days in Hallstatt (it was so peaceful and pretty), but we got up on Thursday and spent most of the day driving to Bolzano, Italy. We started in Austria, crossed over into Germany, back into Austria, and then over into Italy. It was a bit of a circuitous route, but much easier with a big bus than taking the narrow snaking roads through the mountains. They have an interesting custom at the rest stops in Europe. You have to pay 70 cents to use the toilet, but they give you a coupon for 50 cents that you can use to buy snacks. They even let you combine coupons, so I used mine and Bruce's to buy chocolate bars at "half price." What a deal.
We stopped for lunch along the way. Bruce was horrified that we ate lunch at McDonalds, but our options were limited (at least they had a nice view). The hamburgers were pretty much the same as in the US, but they use white cheese instead of yellow, and they never use ice in Europe, so a medium soda is A LOT of coke (no Dr Pepper in Europe).
When we got to Bolzano, we went on a quick walking tour of the town. It didn't take long, because there weren't many sights listed in our guidebook. The big tourist hangout was Walther Piazza. Most people seemed to be eating gelato (Italian ice cream), which you could buy for only 1 Euro (that's really cheap by European standards). Since it was close to dinner time, we found a microbrewery that served traditional Tyrolian food. We both had dumplings and salad. Mine were made with beets and Bruce's were made with spinach. They were good, but very different from the ones we had is Salzburg. Much, much larger - almost like giant meatballs without the meat. We finished the day by finding a geocache in a public garden a little way from the tourists. This geocache was called a "button nano" (meaning VERY tiny). The container looked like the head of a bolt. It was magnetic and stuck to the underside of a park bench right next to all the other bolts. If you hadn't been looking for it, you'd never have known it was there.
The Italian part of the Alps are called the Dolomites. On Friday, many of the people on our tour (there were 28 in all) took off to go hiking in the Alpe di Siusi, which was supposed to have great views of the Dolomites. While it sounded like a nice hike, it involved a 3-hour round trip bus ride. Since we'd just come off a 7-hour bus ride to get to Bolzano, we opted to stay in town and rent bikes. Unfortunately, rental bikes are not always the best quality and the first bike Bruce got, literally rattled apart a mile down the trail. He had to carry it back to the rental stand and swap it out for a new one (if it were me, I probably would have given up the biking idea at that point).
After many false starts with the map, we finally got headed in the right direction taking the bike trail along the river to Runklestein Castle. I don't think many people knew about this place, because it wasn't very crowded. It was a beautiful castle with many painted frescoes still intact on the walls, plus it housed a gallery of paintings from area artists. The best part was that the bike trail sloped slightly downhill all the way back to town, so it was much easier pedaling with my clunky 1-speed bike.
