Review: Ritchey Classic Zeta Wheels

 Ritchey's Classic Zeta Wheels retail for $660 a set, and at that price I wasn't going to buy them. But someone on an internet mailing list was letting them go for $250 and was close enough that I could pick them up locally, so I bought them. The pair weigh around 1500g without quick releases, and I mounted the back wheel onto Bowen's bike just in time for this year's tour.

One of the best feature of the wheel set is that the entire driver, cassette, and axle spindle can be removed from the wheel without tools. This is huge for travel! That means the rear wheel takes up much less space in the bike case, allowing you to pack the bike much more compactly. Of course, if you lose any of the parts, that quickly turns into the worst feature of the wheelset. I made sure to put all those pieces together in one ziplock bag and zipped up the ziplock bag tightly. For the front wheel this feature is much less revolutionary, and feels superfluous.

The other feature of this is that this means you can lube the ratchet mechanism with ease. Tom Ritchey clearly thought through everything when design the hub/ratchet/driver system.

The hubs are light, and the wheels came pretty well built, not needing truing for the 1000 miles or so Bowen has put on these wheels. Of course, given how light he is maybe that's nothing special. Nevertheless, the wheelset is as light as a set of wheels built with much more expensive White Industry hubs. The rear rim has an offset spoke bed so it's relatively strong, and the rim tape that came with the wheels are good.

I'm not sure I'd pay for these at full price, but for a travel bike I would definitely look out for these onsale. In fact, now that Jon Neugent has passed, these might turn out to be my go to wheels for new builds if I can source them at a good price.

Recommended.

June 15th: Misurina to Selva di Cadore

Jobst describes the Giau from this direction as a mere bump in the road, but two things would make it harder for us. First, none of us were Jobst. Second, we would be coming from Misurina, which meant that the first 200m from Cortina of vertical gain would be full of traffic and unshaded. Fortunately, the storm the night before had no just cleared the air of the Canadian wildfire smoke, but also cooled down the atmosphere considerably. At breakfast, I ordered Cappuchino not only for myself, but also for Bowen, drugging my firstborn with his first taste of performance enhancing drugs. His brother, having heard that Bowen was to be drug-enhanced, insisted on getting a Cappuchicno for himself as well! 

We loaded up the tandem with luggage from all 4 of us and rode to the campground to drop off the luggage and pick up Stephan and Otto, giving Bowen and Xiaoqin a headstart with instructions to wait at the bottom of Tre Croci pass in Cortina. Stephan and Otto had acquired their tandem in April just in time for the Pigeon Point qualifying ride. The irony of an Asian-American guy showing a German native the cycling roads in the Alps was not lost on me, but I was very happy that Stephan and Otto were coming along. Otto, being 7, looked up to Boen, who was acting as big brother to him for the first time in his life. Both kids got a lot out of the interaction, with Otto getting his cues from Boen and backing Boen up on everything. It was funny to watch Otto pick up Boen’s attitude, including dissing Bowen every chance they got. 

Riding the Tre Croci road under clear skies, Boen’s caffeine kicked in and we rapidly distanced the group, catching up to Bowen even before the first traffic control gating access to Cortina’s outer suburbs. We spotted the house where I’d had to beg for water from a pitying resident last year after neglecting to fill up at the water fountain at the bottom of the pass. This time, I saw why I’d missed that water fountain. Rather than being at the side of the road, it was at the side of the Cima Bianche bike path, leading from the train station away from Misurina. The day was warm enough that we filled everyone’s bottles and started using the first of our electrolyte tablets. 

Guiding everyone through the city of Cortina, we crossed the bridge spanning the river and started the climb. I’d established a signal group to get everyone in sync. Upon starting the climb I realized that route I’d laid out on Garmin connect tried to take diversions away from the main road in an effort to avoid traffic. I stopped and sent a message to everyone to ignore the GPS route and stick to the main road for the entirety of the climb. In cycling as in driving there is no substituting for using your brain rather than automated navigation systems. 

Mark and Arturo were clearly stronger, and Boen and I brought up the middle. The traffic was annoying so rather than stick together, we spread out and climbed at our own pace. Xiaoqin stayed with Bowen --- this was his first big ride with a lot of traffic, and we knew there was a tunnel en route. When we got to the tunnel even though there was a clear view to the rest area to our left we did not wish to deal the traffic and went straight through the tunnel, in one case riding pat an overloaded cyclist who was walking his bike. 

At the Pocul intersection we regrouped to make sure nobody went up the Falzerago instead. When Bowen and Xiaoqin arrived they had already stopped at the hotel before the intersection to pick up water so did not stop but kept going. That got me overly excited and Boen and I remounted our bike to chase and in the process I completely forgot about my precious CamelBak insulated water bottle sitting in the shade at the intersection. By the time I remembered we were a couple of hundred vertical meters up the road. Mark offered to go back to fetch it but I told him to leave it. In the grand scheme of things we’d be able to replace that bottle later on. 

Once past the intersection at Pocul the traffic was light and Boen and I switched to cycling caps instead of helmet. We were still fresh and hammered along up the climb at a good clip. At 12% grade even a 900m climb doesn’t last very long and in 90 minutes we were at the summit at the pass where we found Arturo and Mark waiting for us. Giau is an impressive summit with a long Dolomitic spire of a peak standing right in front of the summit restaurant. Crowds of people were there --- cyclists, motorists, hikers, all getting photos of the beautiful views. 

When Bowen, Stephan and Otto finally arrived we all had lunch at the resturant, followed by a hike to the spire for more photos. Looking at the available lodging, we found Orso Grigios, a highly rated hotel with a half pension. We booked it through the hotel website rather than booking.com for a better price. Otto wanted to get a headstart on us down the mountain and of course once a tandem gets going there’s no hope of chasing it down if a head started was granted of more than a few seconds. The descent was fast and furious as both sides of the Giau are at 12%. At that grade you have to use the best of techniques on a tandem. Rather than dragging the brakes, what you have to do is to let the bike roll and then brake hard down to walking speed for each corner before letting the brakes go completely. To do otherwise is to invite brake fade on disc brakes or overheating the rims to the point of a tire blowoff on a rim brake. 

We arrived at the bottom just in time to see Stephan, Otto, Arturo, and Mark ride off. We chose to wait for Bowen and Xiaoqin and then rode up to the hotel, where Otto Senior had already offloaded the RV with our baggage. Checking into the hotel, we quickly made use of the advertised swimming pool only to discover to our disappointment that it was a typical ski-resort swimming pool, more for wading and bathing than for satisfying swimming. 

After that, it was laundry and then dinner, which delighted everyone after 4 nights o Miralago. Every dish (including the goulash soup) was made with care and the presentation was outstanding. We ate a satisfying meal. The skies had gone from clear to threatening, and it actually started raining in the middle of our evening walk, whereupon we had to cut it short and retire to an early evening. 

June 14: Son Forca

When I first laid out the tour, I knew that Mirusina for 3 nights was required. What made me add a 4th night was that the 3rd night was a Friday, and I did not want to start a tour on a Saturday. The issue with Saturdays is that lodging is hard to find on tour, and with a big pass in the offing I wanted the tour start on a Sunday to reduce time pressure. I could have cheduled a night in Cortina D’ampezzo, but my experience with Cortina was not good, plus the city was low at 1300m. I wanted to maximize altitude acclimation and Misurina at 1770m served my purposes much better. 

Getting our bikes out on Saturday morning, we got everyone all settled and then started riding after mounting the requisit gear on the bikes for our short ride.The descent from Misurina was fast and quick, but the climb up to Tre Croci from the Misurina side wasn’t as trivial as I expected, though still only about 200m. The Tre Croci pass sign is in a terrible place and not terribly photogenic compared with the rest of the ride. 

Arriving at the bottom of the chairlift, we locked up our bikes, used the batfrooms, bought tickets, and then got onto the chairlift to the top. I had low expectations for the hike, and indeed the first couple of kilometers were boring g and actually had me worried. The hike was entirely in the warm sun, a long what looked like a ski trail filled with skree and unpleasant to the feet. The “lakes” marked on the map were clearly feeder ponds for snow-making equipment for the ski resort. 

Once we got onto a narrow single track, however, the trail improved. Now we had shade, wildflowers, and what looked like a viewpoint to look forward to. At one point, I looked left and to my surprise saw a cave! I challenged Otto and Boen to traverse the cave. Bowen took that as a challenge as well and discovered that it was no big deal. After that, we all joined in and traversed the cave (which turned out to be a tunnel) The other side of the tunnel nothing less than a picnic bench as well as what loooked like an established fire ring as well as a view into Cortina D’ampezzo! We were amazed, spending many minutes taking pictures from every angle and enjoying the shaded picnic benches. We looked up and saw what looked like a viewpoint. Going back through the tunnel, we found the unmarked trails that led us to above the tunnel exit. 

After we walked on to the designated viewpoint and discovered that not only did it disclose more views of other mountains, it also revealed a trail down to the town of Cortina D’Ampezzo. A good hike would have been to start with a bus ride to the chairlift and use it to hike back to Cortina D’Ampezzo if you were staying in that town. Given the sparsely scheduled bus service, you probably did not want to reverse that hike! 

It was warm by the time we backtracked to the chairlift --- I’d used up all of my water, and the water taps at the top and bottom of the chairlift were all marked “kein trainkwasser”. The default in the Alps is for all water to be drinkable unless marked otherwise, so when you see a marking to the contrary you take it seriously. Fortunately, from the chairlift to the first hotel on Tre Croci was but a short climb easily done given our negligible metabolic activity. There, the hotel’s taps were not marked so we refilled our water and rode back up to Misurina. 

Cycling, as with hiking, rewards out and back trips as the return to Misurina is impressive. I noticed other hiking trails that could be used in the future, though I do not think we need to return to the area for a while. At Quinz, we stopped for lunch just so we could get relief from horrible Miralago food. 

After lunch, we dropped the kids. Arturo had looked into taking the 4WD service to the open air WW1 museum that’s on top of a plateau but had realized that it was too late --- there was a storm on the way and he would not have time to explore the museum. He had already changed into hiking clothes, but Xiaoqin, Mark, and I decided to ride up to the first lake we had visited 3 days ago before the storm hit. I would, of course, ride the tandem without Boen since he wasn’t going to ride if his brother didn’t have to. 

The ride up was hard, even though it was only a mile or so. As we arrived at the lake, we started feeling raindrops and to our surprise Arturo made it there in time to shoot photos for us. We took our shots, turned our bikes around and rode down to the hotel to put our bikes away just before the rain came down in earnest. 

Over dinner that evening, I briefed the next day’ ride --- after the ride down to Cortina, we’d exit as quickly as possible for the annoying 3-5km to the Pocul intersection, where I expected most of the traffic to be diverted to the Falzerago pass rather than the Giau. My advice to Otto Senior was for him to drive to the top of the pass and ride down to meet us. We would drop our luggage to the RV in the mornings before departing. It being a Sunday we would find lodging on the other side of the pass as suited us. 

Review: Shift

 Shift claims to be abook about managing your emotions. In reality, you can't manage your emotions. When they are aroused, they'll be aroused, and all you can do is to manage your reactions to your emotions so you don't do something dumb.

The book discusses various tricks you can play. For instance, you can reframe your view of the situation. An example in the book is when you see someone else succeed you can view that as inspiration rather than envy. Another approach is to call your friends to talk through your feelings. Here, the book does a good job of explaining that not everyone is going to be good for you to talk to, and how to split your friends into "people who will listen to me", and "people who will help me." There's even a category for "people who will listen to me but reinforce my bad behavior." 

Another way is to pre-emptively design your environment so your behavior is better. For instance, if there aren't chocolate chip cookies in the house you can't just eat. One thing that the author mentions is the use of music to regulate mood and emotion. It's not hard to do but it's hard to consciously do. Another point he makes is that if you don't regularly make phone calls to your friends it's also very hard to remember to do that when you do need to call, because you're not in practice. The practice of regularly staying in touch and calling your friends when you don't need to needs to be there to reinforce your behavior when you do need to talk to them. (He doesn't mention how to make friends, however!)

The book does unnecessarily name drop names and humble brags about the author's really privileged background. But that's ok. I still was reminded of really good techniques in this book. It's worth your time.

June 13: Secada Loop

Last year, Western Wheeler member Cindy Asrir on her trip to Italy as part of her choir sent back pictures of the Secada Loop from Selva Gardena That was so pretty and I was determined to make it a part of this year trip. The problem, of course, is that public transit in the Dolomites would not make the trip feasible without a private car. I explored the idea of renting a car from Cortina but the car rental companies had weird rules about when we could return the cars, so in the end I gave up and organized a private taxi ride at an outrageous price. I would later justify it to myself by saying that compared to the backroads $1000/person/night prices with 6 people I was getting away with a bargain at substantially less than 1/6th the price.

The taxi showed up at precisely the time they promised and we piled into it for the long ride th Selva Gardena, where Bowen and I had been in 2019. The ride was long because Passo Falzerago was closed, so the driver had to take the long way around via Bruneck, etc. , backtracking in 2 hours what took us 2 days of riding to do.

Arriving at the cable car, we paid the exorbitant (but still less than the backroads price) fee for the 6 of us and rode it to the top. At 2000m, the weather was still warm enough for me to feel hot, which made me glad that Misurina was at 1770m instead of the much lower 1200m that Selva Gardena was at.

The Secada Loop was just as famous as Tre Cime di Laverado but didn’t feel as crowded. The hike immediately takes you to the best views. To me this was a stunning view, but Arturo said it reminded him of some landscapes in the Sierra, so it didn’t feel as exotic to him as the hike we had done the day before. “Of course, it’s much more accessible --- in the Sierras getting to those places would take a couple of days of backpacking!”

What I liked most about the hike was how diverse it was. You would go from these dramatic views of these spikey peaks overrun with tourists, and then descend down to the Naitonal Park, and once you got to the National Park trails the crowds would mysteriously fade way. Bowen complained that there was a stone in his shoe that wouldn’t go away. But after several attempts to get of it in vain, we made him take off his socks and indeed it was a blister! Fortunately, we were close to a mountain hut/restaurant, and Arturo quickly chatted with some British hikers who happened to have compeed! He liberated one from them and applied it to Bowen’s foot with instant relief.

WIth that behind us, we kept on hiking through the quiet phase of the trail, which had impressive flowers. When we neared the cable cars again, it became rather obvious as the number of hikers increased along with the services ---- mountain huts, water fountains, and even marked trails. I would later consider this hike the best of the trip.

All this time, our taxi service company continually sent me a text via Whatsapp asking of our status so that we could get a pickup without waiting too long at the end of the hike. When we finished we hike down, but instead of waiting for our driver we found and ice cream shop and started walking towards it. To my surprise, the walk involved a tunnel, an escalator, and a moving walkway that dumped us out in the middle of town. This was amazing. I shared our location to the taxi service and he showed up just as we finished our ice cream, but not before I bought a box of compeed at Italian prices at the pharmacy next to the ice cream shop. Once having bought the insurance, we would discover that we didn’t need it for the rest of the trip!

The ride back to Miralago was uneventful. The driver asked if we wanted to visit Lago de Braes, but we decided we were tired and had another full day ahead of us. That night, Stephan joined us at Miralago for dinner, and we debated various possibilities for the next day. What won was Xiaoqin’s suggestion for a hike that started from the cable car near the Tre Croci summit.  While the cable car was served by a bus, we realized that it was close enough and easy enough to ride to the start by bike instead. This would give everyone a chance to shake out their bike and see if there were any problems prior to the big ride of the Giau the day after.

Review: Specialized Men's SL Pro Short Finger Gloves and Supacaz Supa G Short Glove

 Specialized had a sale, and I grabbed the Men's SL Pro Short Finger Gloves for $20, and a pair of Supacaz Supa G Short Gloves for the same amount. Both are unpadded, intended for hot summer days where padding would add more discomfort than it would take away. You are not advised to use these gloves on rough surfaces like gravel rides or bad pavement where you needed extra padding.

I cannot feel any material differences between the fabric used for these gloves. What makes the SL Pro gloves superior is the pull tabs built into the gloves that let you pull the gloves off your hands without flipping the gloves inside out.

During this year's tours, I switched to these gloves after leaving Misurina, and had them on until after Landeck, where I had stupidly stowed them into Boen's feedbag and then forgot I had them there. I thought those gloves were lost and switched to the Specialized Grail padded gloves. To my surprise, the lack of padding didn't lead to any discomfort, and despite gravel or rough surfaces I never felt I wanted more padding. When I switched back to padded gloves I discovered that the padding didn't help me as much as I thought they did.

Give these a try on your next hot summer ride. I think you'll enjoy them.

June 12: Tre Cime di Laverado

 

We had breakfast, which gave us false hope and a relief of the bacherlor’s cooking the night before by being decent, with service that was fast enough that we could make it out to the bus stop for our hike of the day. When the bus arrived, we were surprised at the crowd and worried that we might not have seats, but the bus squeezed us all aboard and as far as I can remember not more than a handful of people had to stand.

The road up to the hike itself is an experience. It climbed a solid 12-15% grade to the lake we’d been to the day before before settling down and weaving around the mountain side of the National Park. With each corner, the views would improve, gaining us more and more visibility. There was a noticeable haze in the air. “That’s from the wild fires in Canada, going all the way across the Atlantic,” Arturo told us.

When we got off the bus we could see that this was a major attraction --- the parking lot was full (and there were lots of signs at the bottom of the road telling people that a permit was required to park at the top and that those permits were all sold out!), and the crowds were incredible even though we were on the first bus of the day! “The bus only started running last week!” remarked Mark Brody.

Well, nobody goes to Europe expecting a wilderness experience for their hikes, so we braced ourselves and walked along the designated trail. “This is like nothing I’ve seen before,” said Arturo. Coming from him this was unusual, as Arturo was an avid hiker and much better traveled than I was. The landscape of the Dolomites is unusual above the treeline, with lots of rocks, but not made out of granite like the Sierra and the rest of the Alps, giving it the unique shapes --- mountains shoointg uptowards the sky in spikes as the harder wearing rocks stand distinct from the surrounding areas which were subject to normal rates of wear.

The circumnavigation of the three peaks took us to various world war 1 monuments and gun emplacements. Arturo knew a lot of the history, and gave us a running exposition. While the crowds did eventually thin out, the hike was so easy that never did it thin to the point where you didn’t have to wait to take a photo without other people in it. Nevertheless, I was glad to finally do this hike, years after Lukas Panitz recommended it to me in 2021.

I had thought that we might want to hike back down instead of taking the bus back, but by the time we were done, we were all strangely tired, and with Bowen limping we decided to take the bus back.

I will stop bragging about how bad the meal at Miralago was now. The after dinner walk around the lake was great, and with rain coming we hoped the haze from the Canadian fires would be washed away.

Arturo went to talk to the various campground on Stephan’s behalf. Despite our advice to the contrary, his father had decided to rent an RV for the trip. I had warned that the roads we chose were unlikely to have fun driving on the RV, but he was not confident of his ability to get the Misurina on an ebikes, and obviously the RV was much cheaper to stay in than the hotels we were staying, and they wouldn’t be subject to Miralago food.

The closest campground wouldn’t take reservations but told Arturo that if they made it to them by 9:00am the next morning there would be space. We would be gone by the time they arrived, since we had previous plans. Stephan had done a lot of hiking in the Dolomites so he did not feel obligated to join us for our hikes.

Index Page: 2025 Tour of the Dolomites, Slovenia, Austria, and Engadin Alps

 From June 9th to July 4th, Xiaoqin, Bowen, Boen and myself execute a cycle tour starting in the Dolomites and visiting Slovenia, Austria, the Stelvio, and then the Engadin Alps. This was Bowen's first tour riding on his single bike, a Rivendell Roadini. This was Xiaoqin's first tour on her Ritchey Logic Road bike. Joining us for the first 2 and a half weeks or so were Arturo Crespo, Mark Brody, Stephan Ellner, his son Otto, his father Otto Sr.. Joining us for just a few days was Ben Kochie. This was Stephan and Otto's first tour on their Co-Motion Periscope tandem. We totaled 732 miles (1178km) and 57005' (17375m) of climbing on the bike, and 70 miles (112km) and 10466'  (3190m) of climbing on foot. We had one flat tire, one bent chainring prior to the start, and just a couple of days of riding in the rain. Bowen's Garmin Edge 830 died due to screen delamination during the trip. We lost a water bottle, Stephan broke a pair of cycling shoes and his Pixel 6a (which was cracked at the start of the tour) also died during the tour.

This is the index page and collection for our photos, some videos, and day by day trip reports.

Pictures:

• Na Family Photos

Videos (courtesy of Xiaoqin):

• June 11 (Misurina Approach)
• June 14 (Misurina to Son Forca chairlift)
• June 15 (Misurina to Passo Giau)
• June 16 (Selva di Cadore to Barcis)
• June 17 (Barcis to Rifugio Pian dei Ciclaimani)
• June 18 Rifugio Pian dei Ciclamani to Bohinsjka Bela
• June 20 Bohinsjka Bela to Untervellach 
• June 23 Grossglockner 

Day by day trip reports:

• June 8-9: Prologue
• June 10: Sterzing to Bruneck
• June 11: Toblach to Misurina
• June 12: Tre Cime Laverado
• June 13: Secada Loop
• June 14: Son Forca
• June 15: Misurina to Selva di Cardore
• June 16: Selva di Cadore to Barcis
• June 17: Barcis to Rifugio Plan dei Ciclamani
• June 18: Rifugio Plan dei Ciclamani to Bohinjska Bela
• June 19: Lake Bled
• June 20: Bohinjska Bela to Untervellach
• June 21: Untervellach to Nikolsdorf
• June 22: Nikolsdorf to Heiligenblut am Grossglockner
• June 23: Heiligenblut am Grossglockner to Krimml
• June 24: Krimml to Mayrhofen
• June 25: Mayrhofen Rest Day
• June 26: Mayrhofen to Pfunds
• June 27: Pfunds to Trafoi
• June 28: Trafoi to Livigno
• June 29: Pontresina Panaromic Hike (rest day)
• June 30: Livigno to Madulain
• July 1: Madulain to Bergun
• July 2: Bergun to Lenzerheide
• July 3: Lenzerheide to Lustenau
• July 4: Lustenau to Lindau
• July 5-6: Epilogue

Equipment Reviews

• Specialized SL Pro Gloves
• Ritchey Classic Zeta Wheels
• 4monster stowable backpack
• Sim Card for Europe

Review: Spent by Alison Bechdel

 Alison Bechdel is famous for her rule about how to evaluate women characters in movies. I didn't have first hand experience of her work, so I picked up Spent from the library. It turns out that this book is part of a series, and you really have a hard time reading it without  having read the other books in the series. You can pick it up from context, but with such a large cast of characters I found it really hard to care about most of them. Actually, I found it impossible to care about any of them.

First of all, the book is sort of an autobiography --- the main character is Alison Bechdel, a successful cartoonist whose books got turned into a TV show. She has to struggle with her trump supporting sister who in reaction is writing a book of her own, her partner who's a goat farmer of sorts, and various characters that move in and out of her house.

The book depicts left wing liberal angst to an extreme. I find it hard to believe people actually talk or behave like this in real life (and I consider myself extremely left wing, or at least, anti-right wing). Do people really conflate Marxism with polyamory and all sorts of other things? Is this meant to be funny? If it is, I'm afraid the humor is entirely lost on me. Similarly, there's a lot of angst about money (despite having a lot of success), but given what the characters spend money on it's hard to reconcile that with the plotlines.

The art is OK. Nothing special. The worst thing about the hardback is that it's hard to keep it open to read! The kindle version is probably the one to get just to avoid that problem, but I was too cheap to buy the book and just read it from the library. Good thing I did. I'd be unhappy if I spent any of my hard earned money on a book with effectively no plot and no interesting characters.

June 11th: Toblach to Misurina

 

Waking up at 4:00am because of jet-lagged, I worked through the options and decided that with Bowen’s injury, I shouldn’t opt for the visit to Lago de Braes and that we should just take the dirt route to Misurina from Toblach. We were so jet-lagged that we made the 8:00am train from Toblach, while Arturo and Mark were still having breakfast. We’d had breakfast by buying from the bakery across the street from the apartment the moment it opened at 6:00am!

The train ride to Toblach from Bruneck was free for us, since we had guest cards from the apartment we’d checked into. We had to buy tickets for our bikes, however! The train ride was smooth --- infact, I wouldn’t have to take apart the tandem for the rest of the trip.

Getting off the train, we visited the cultural center that was obvious from the train station. From there, we followed cyclists to the bike path where we were immediately confronted with a barrier notifying us that the bike path was closed. We followed the road that I’d designated on the GPS and refound the bike path to the Toblachersee, where we had had lunch during the 2021 bike tour. Nothing was opened yet so there was no one to photo bomb us as we took pictures of our first views of the Dolomites.

We tried the road for a while instead of the bike path but it was incredibly busy for a Wednesday morning and soon we decided that the dirt bike path was the lesser of two evils. In the uphill direction and with a short ride that day, the slow speed of the bike path was less objectional than in the downhill direction. Indeed, the views were dramatic as mountain after mountain unfolded before as as the bike path weaved in and out of the trees revealing one peak after another until we reached the designated view point for the peaks we would circumnavigate tomorrow, Tre Cime di Laverado!

Past that, the dirt path headed straight for the dirt road to Cortina d’Ampezzo where our progress was impeded for a few minutes by a herd of cows providing the soundtrack for the European Mountains --- cowbells!

Rather than follow the annoying tunnel bike path to Cortina, we turned left on the paved road towards Misurina. It was our first climb of the trip, and though short, it was warm enough that I was glad I wasn’t doing it in the full heat of day. Boen and I attacked the hill with vigor, even passing a couple of unloaded single cyclists, though of course plenty of ebikes would pass us. At the top of the climb the road levelled out and we waited at the corner where the turnoff to Quinz was. The lake was as beautiful as I remembered, though in our 4 nights there we would never see it fully reflective as  mirror as the morning I’d seen it in 2014.

Mark and Arturo had caught up to Bowen and Xiaoqin, and when they arrived we took a group picture before settling down to lunch at Quinz, where the menu was the same as the year before when Boen, Arturo and I had dinner the previous year before heading to Murano.

We ate our lunch and then proceeded to Hotel Miralago. I had wanted to stay at Quinz, but they had not replied to my e-mail, and when I called them the answering machine was in Italian. Arturo’s Spanish would probably have let him get through, but when I asked him to make the attempt he was on a a trip and he’d forgotten all about it, while Miralago was the cheapest of all the other hotels who’d bothered to respond to my inquiries. Miralago’ rooms were great, but while the breakfast was decent, the dinner set a benchmark for how badly food could be prepared at a highly rated hotel/restaurant for the entire trip. There was no way you could tell from the Google reviews, of course, as the aggregate points for Miralago was the same as for Quinz, but Quinz had clearly superior food. The smart thing to do would have been to just get bed and breakfast at Miralago and just make reservations for 4 nights of dinners at Quinz, but obviously that was only in retrospect. Arturo also made the observation that the staff at Miralago didn’t appear to care about giving guests a good experience. He theorized that the rooms had recently been renovated to a high level, and the owners of the hotel were skimping everywhere else in an effort to recoup the cost. The lady who dealt with breakfast, however, clearly worked hard and cared, and might have been single-handedly redeeming the hotel’s reputation on Google. In any case, for the rest of the trip, no matter how bad the food was, the comparison was always, “It’s still better than Miralago.”

Having checked in and played on the Zipline playground, we proceeded to walk around Lake Misurina, one of the prettiest lakes in the mountains of Europe, and a walk I never got sick of despite our 4 days there. No one swam in the lake, however. There was a lot of work going on in the cable cars though they wouldn’t open for hiking traffic in the time we were there.

On the other side of the main road from Quinz was the supermarket (open every day of the year!) and an outdoor shop. Arturo had regretted his earlier decision to leave his walking shoes in Munich and proceeded to rectify that by buying a pair of shoes and a backpack. Bargaining with the owner he got such a good price that it was the owner who paid Arturo to take the backpack off his hands!

With his new shoes equipped, Xiaoqin then led us on a hike up to the second lake that’s on the road to the next day’s hike. This second lake was also impressive and the hiking took enough of the day that by the time we got back to Miralago it was time to take showers and do laundry. Bowen’s wound kept oozing. From experience I knew this was no big deal and only to be expected from moist wound care, but because of the amount of discharge he was going through my supply of Tergaderm quickly, so I texted Stephan who had landed in Munich and asked him to procure additional supplies while he was in a big city.

That evening, Miralago demonstrated what their half pension was like. Bad salad with no dressing and two hot dogs, each sliced in half and barely grilled. The desserts were decent, but only because we suspected they were procured rather than made in the kitchen. We did not know the horror that would be served the next evening --- baked beans served cold out of a can.

Review: Our Moon

Our Moon was a random pick – filling up the kindle prior to a flight. The author weaves between actual exposition of the scientific facts and theories about the moon and its creation (and subsequence exploration by humans), and wildly wacko stuff that seems irrelevant, such as native Americans being offended by the moon landings (seriously? Why should I care? Why should anyone hold back progress for people with pre-scientific cultural taboos)

I learned a ton of interesting facts, such as the current theory that the moon was the result of a collision between two proto-earths, and the various differences in calendaring systems that all have to struggle with reconciling the differences between the lunar orbit and the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.

But to extract all that I had to wade through tons and tons of irrelevant material. This book could have used a much better editor.

June 10th: Sterzing to Bruneck

When I first planned this trip, I thought that it would have been easy to get a train trip from Munich to Innsbruck and then catch the local train to Fortezza and Toblach. However, the local train line between Bruneck and Fortezza was under renovation and so we’d have to ride! That forced me to put in for a night in Bruneck. Then I figured out that the FlixBus was cheaper for a connection than the train. However, Arturo couldn’t get a bike position on the bus, and Stephan pointed out to me that the FlixBus explicitly denied tandems! So I broke down, cancelled the FlixBus (which gave me a credit for future use), and scheduled a taxi to Innsbruck.

Once the taxi arrived, we had to struggle a bit to put 3 bikes + the tandem into it. I ended up decoupling the tandem to get everything to fit, which annoyed me since I’d explicitly told the company we had a tandem. To save time,I talked to the driver and got him to agree to drop us off at Sterzing instead of Innsbruck. The poor guy looked confused and reminded me that Sterzing was in Italy, not Austria and I told him that’s correct, that’s what we wanted, and fortunately he’d agreed!

Mark Brody had already ridden to Sterzing the night before and agreed to meet with us. The driver dropped us off near downtown. Xiaoqin had found a sandwich shop with great reviews, and I reassembled the tandem, just past Mark met us. We had lunch and ice cream together before riding down the bike path towards Bruneck.

From Sterzing to Bruneck is the Alto Aldige bike path which is mostly downhill until Fortezza, whereupon we would have to climb 2000’ to Bruneck. I was familiar with the bike path --- it’s scenic in this direction and much less strenuous than in the other direction, which had multiple double digit grades which were a bear to deal with on the tandem.

Unfortnately, with the downhill and jet-lag, Bowen had a momentary lapse and crashed on a gravel patch around a corner. A local saw us and took him into her house to clean and scrub the wound as well as bandage it. I’d packed some Tergaderm and anti-biotic  cream and would apply it later in the evening after we got to the hotel, but poor Bowen would start the tour limping around for a week or so until his knee got better.

After Fortezza we found the car rest stop where we’d had Weiss Wurst last year during our century, and had some ice cream before negotiating the tricky part of the bike path that had gotten me lost no less than twice in the other direction. From this direction the bike path was much easier to follow, and we made it to Bruneck around 5:00pm. Mark had found a deal for a hotel but it was high up on a ski resort so we parted ways.

Arriving at Bruneck, we found the apartment which had no restaurant attached but we were hungry enough that even though the pizzeria we went to was mediocre we still ate everything. Doing laundry and cleaning Bowen’s wounds took enough time that we were quickly asleep after that.