Dolomite mountains

At breakfast you get the dinner menu and tick your choices for that day. I tend to choose and then forget about it. So we boarded the coach for a day in the mountains and climbed steadily to 2500+ metres, round a great many hairpin bends. The coach driver certainly earned his money today! It was the perfect day to do it as it was a lovely sunny day and you could see for miles, whereas when it’s cloudy you can’t see very much at all as you’re up in the clouds.
Our tour guide is very much into food and drink and tells us all about what’s available locally. The area we were in today was part of Austria until the end of the war and although it’s now in Italy many people don’t speak Italian but German and it’s very much Tyrol skiing country.
The local speciality is apple strudel and he highly recommended a particular cafe at our first stop of the day to try it, so I did and it was very nice. Then on the coach toward our second stop he said the strudel there was totally different and the most apple-y apple he had ever tasted, so I decided to have more, to compare. Then back in the hotel for dinner what had I chosen but apple strudel! My conclusion after 3 in one day is that whichever you have it’s nicer with ice cream and apple strudel is not particularly exciting anyway!
At the aforementioned second stop it was the highest point we reached in the mountains and there was a cable car took you even higher. One of us was dead keen to go up but the other didn’t really fancy it so we went up but didn’t stay long. The air was noticeably thinner and made you feel a bit wierd (well ok wierder than usual). I didn’t have apple strudel at stop number 3 but I did have another Hugo to drink. It didn’t come with all the accoutrements like the one yesterday and wasn’t quite as nice but it was still very refreshing which our guide reckons is down to the elderflower in it.
Manuel the waiter was back tonight (think it must have been his day off yesterday) and he was very entertaining, especially when he nearly had a fight with Mr Fawlty over getting in each other’s way. Next time each of them passed they both blamed the other!