The morning greeted us with an early start but just mere droplets of rain prior to the start. The climb up to Passo Mendola was easy as I remembered so many years ago. But the descent from the pass was much rainier than I previously experienced, which detracted a bit from the views, though when the clouds parted enough for us to see the views, they were pretty good.
We were soaked through at the bottom of the pass, but fortunately, had to travel the extremely busy main road for but one block before I spotted the entrance to the bike path to Bolzano. This is where having been to the place once before helped, because the traffic would have been daunting otherwise. The rain was much less at the bottom of the pass than up high, but even so, while we were in the tourist information at the center of Bolzano trying to get lodging it absolutely poured. Fortunately, it let up enough for us to get to the hotel, get registered, unpack and showered.
The first order of business was to replace my torn up Capris. Paying European prices for clothing is not on my list of favorite things to do, but the good part was the Cloudveil Capris I had bought were no longer in production for men, while men's Capris were common and fairly easy to find in Europe. Capris are the most practical casual clothing for occasional cycling. Nevertheless, I ended up at the huge Sportler shop and found only one acceptable pair of pants that were a decent fit, provided I didn't gain any more weight.
After that, we had lunch at a good pizza place, and then went to stand in line for the Oetzi museum. It was a small muesum but very well done, and we easily spent 2 hours in it before leaving to walk around town and admire various features like the locks on the bridge and the town square.
Dinner was at an Asian/Italian restaurant with high prices but insufficient quantity or quality of food. We did manage to our laundry done. Arturo and Hina were worried about the weather, at one point musing about the possibility of hopping onto the train to Vienna where the weather was warm and sunny. A detailed examination of the weather forecast, however, showed that while the forecast called for rain, it was in relatively small quantities of less than a millimeter, so going forward with the tour was definitely feasible. We declared the "neero day" a success as a result.
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