June 26th: Livigno to Merano

 In the morning we ate a quick but thorough breakfast before riding out towards the Livigno tunnel. Boen discovered to his surprise as he tried to roll the tandem out of the garage without panniers that he could not even make it up the little ramp from the garage back to the road!

As anticipated, right at the lake, a fast paceline caught us and Boen and I immediately jumped into the middle of the group and got towed along at 20-25mph, with the paceline occasionallky pogoing as we went in and out of galleries, around traffic islands, or tackled a gentle turn. Both Boen and I were pedaling much too hard to even consider taking pictures, but we knew this was much faster and easier than riding on our own.

Arriving at the tunnel, we were quite a bit ahead of the designated 9:45am start time for the crossing. The van with its trailer for bikes were there, and so was the driver. He looked at our tandem and commented that he'd have to stow it inside the van. Arturo showed up about 15 minutes later. "I was taking a photo and by the time I got my phone back in my pocket it was too late to catch the paceline!" 2 more cyclists showed up.

At the designated time, the driver loaded up all the bikes onto the trailer and proceeded to charge us 6 Euros each for driving a bike through the tunnel, with the tandem counting as one bike.

Once on the other side, we once again had to climb Ofenpass but this time in weather that wasn't as rainy. At the top of Ofenpass we took another quick picture and then quickly rode down the other side, past Santa Maria and then onto Mustair, whether tbe border was. In the past, I've ridden onto the dirt bike path immediately on the Italian side, but this time I told Arturo that in the interest of time, we should stay on the road until the bike path turned into pavement.

Once at Laudes we followed the instructions onto a short climb before intersecting with the bike path the Merano and proceeded quicky down the bike path towards Glorenza. At Glorenza we saw the hot dog stand but unfortunately it was closed! I'd hope to stop there for lunch, but this was not to be. Instead we kept rolling down the bike path, stopping at a lake with ducks where we ate the food we had bought the previous day, with Boen feeding the leftover bread to the ducks.

"It feels strange to roll past the Prato Allo Stelvio exit and not ride it!" I declaimed to Arturo.  As we kept going past Prato Allo Stelvio, the bike path would alternate between dirt and pavement. Arturo wasn't as confident as we were on the dirt so we soon left him behind, only for him to catch back up to us when we finally stopped for ice cream at the road side stand.

We debated to ride on to Bolzano or stay in Merano but as we rode into Merano the weather started to turn. I'd spotted SuiteSeven on Booking.com as having a nice air conditioned apartment at a good price. I pushed for us to just show up and ask, but when the directions got us to the location we discovered that the location had no reception. Everything was done virtually. Well, I'd paid for a month of Skype unlimited for good reason so I called the number. The virtual receptionist told us that they had to call and see if staff was available to make up the room and asked for a number for callback. We gave her Boen's Italian sim card phone number and she called us back 5 minutes later with the affirmative, even remotely unlocking the lock box for us so we could retrieve the key!

Fascinatingly, the bike storage was the common bathroom on the second floor, which was guaded by the card key we were given, so we left our bikes in there and moved in. We turned on the AC, took showers and did laundry and the staff showed up to deliver a 3rd bed. We then went out to have an early dinner at the Tapas place around the corner and ice cream next door to it. The price was good and the food very good. We could also find open supermarkets easily and buy fruits and additional snacks. At the supermarket we tried to find sugar-free/caffeine free coke but couldn't --- instead we found this odd drink called Chinotto, which had neither sugar nor caffeine. We would try it and it would taste like chinese medicine. The funny thing was that as awful as it tasted we still kept drinking it until the bottle was empty by morning.

Walking around Merano in between rain storms I was impressed by how nice it was. I realized that it was a mistake on previous trips to just head on to Bolazno directly instead of staying at Merano.