Back at the Alps

Date: 2005-07-10 19:52 UTC
Location: Sta Maria im M, Switzerland
Mileage: 207 km

Tunnel, Tunnel, Tunnel... (etc, sung to the badger song), very descriptive of the first part of our journey towards Passo dello Stelvio, and this was in the normal roads, so the tunnels were quite old and definitely dangerous, especially since locals seem to have no problem overtaking inside a tunnel where there are two opposing lanes and insufficient lightning (we were going plenty over the speed limit, just not enough it seems).

When reaching the national park of dello Stelvio less tunnels and more serpentine, though the few tunnels that were there have been dug around the roman times and are unlit, wet and narrow, here the locals were not so keen on overtaking in the middle of one. From nearly at the top of the pass the road forks and we continued onto Swiss side (towards the only hotel in the area that had free rooms) to Santa Maria im Müstertal (the writing form of this valley seems to depend on who you ask, anyways it's right next to the Italian border) trough a rather small road, so small in fact that it was not asphalted for the whole lenght of it (a major surprise), also the asphalted part was not in too good repair. Luckily there was only light rain, in heavier rain the dirt part would have been very interesting (and not in a fun way) indeed.

Once in the village finding Hotel Stelvio (46N36'03.6'', 10E25'22.3'') was very simple and since they cater for mountain bikers and also rent bikes they have a small workshop and washing facilities for bikes which they kindly allowed to use so that the the dirt deposited on our bikes would not get cemented on (there was a lot of it, filling parts of cooling the fins of the engines too, not good), they also have a laundry service which we were very happy to take advantage of (after over 2 weeks on the road we're running out of clean [for rather loose values of clean even] clothes).

There is a restaurant in the hotel as well, not horribly expensive considering we're in Switzerland, offer god food with fairly large portions. From the room I can reach a wireless network "default", which offers access to internet, I don't know who it belongs to but I'm going to use it to read my emails (downloading hundreds and hundreds of spam-messages is not a productive use of GPRS connection) etc, I hope they have flat rate so that I'm not inducing any financial burden on them but OTOH they really should not leave an open network in default configuration laying around if they have to pay extra if someone stumbles upon it.

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