Peelies travels

Above Prutz is the Serfaus-Fiss-Ladis ski area, named after the three villages up there. We get a free bus pass as part of the tourist tax deal and having spent a day up there two weeks ago, we plan a ‘big day’. Getting the 09:02 bus might not seem too much of a stretch but it’s really cold in the morning and we have to make a big effort to hit the button on the warm air heater. We pack clothes for walking at nearly 3,000m (didn’t need them) and food and plenty of water. It looks as though we are going for a week. This ski area is buzzing with visitors. It’s very modern with good quality cable cars and they are all running. The whole place is family friendly and that means toddlers as well as crazy bigger kids and parents with mountain bikes. There’s a huge number of tracks for the bikes to use to descend and the cable cars are designed for bikes to be taken in them. As a result it’s a busy weekend, helped by perfect weather. We have planned a ridge walk and we take the Schönjochbahn c...

Studying the maps to find a nice route into Austria meant looking for squiggles because squiggles means hairpins. Google maps wasn’t interested in the route I found on our detailed OsmAnd maps. We generally use Google maps as a check for traffic delays but it would not route us over the squiggles that I found. Timmelsjoch pass appeared to fit the bill though. It’s another high pass (2,509m), on the Italy-Austria border and driving from the south it’s very steep. This is clearly a less used pass. There were a few cars and bikers and one or two cyclists, impressing us as usual. At the top it was cold and had snowed in the last few hours. Unlike the popular passes, there’s very little at the top. There is a small exhibition about the construction of the road in recent times but the pass has been a route through the Alps for centuries , linking the Passeiertal and Ötztal valleys. There is one very nice small restaurant on the Austrian side of the top, with enticing apfel küchen and we were...

The drive over the Alps to the warmth of Italy was Plan B, if Plan A was affected by the weather. Almost two weeks ago the alpine weather was beginning to look dodgy, at least in western Austria. That’s why we executed ‘B’, went to Lago d’Iseo and promptly got battered by a six hour mega thunderstorm. At least the rest of the time in the lake area between Como and Garda was a sunny success and we really enjoyed the warmth, scenery, value for money and the lake waters. It was time for another plan; the route to Rotterdam and the best use of the time. The Tyrol had been a good couple of days and we liked the site at Prutz. So we hatched a plan to go there for at least two full days of high level walking and then make a reasonably speedy dash for the ferry. The alpine weather forecast for the last week of September seems to be good so why not? We head north, towards Trento and pick a route that appears to wiggle through the mountains of Lombardy and Trento. We actually pass many factories...

The cleaner had gone and Mr. Happy was nowhere to be seen when we left his campsite and headed east towards the tiny Lago d’Idro.   We picked a small road over the mountains using Wikiloc which was listed as moderately difficult but from the photos looked ok but very narrow. We drove up to a little weekend type of ski resort at 1,664, which was totally closed, but we had a coffee in the car park before setting off on the stony track. Very fortunately, we only met a couple of motorbikes coming the other way. We were driving on the down slope side of the road and there was nothing below us on that side. It was very airy. There was nothing tricky about the road save for a narrow gallery near the beginning and we enjoyed the drive over the top and down into the valley, direct into Anfo at the lake.  This is beautifully positioned between steep hillsides and is in a very natural state. The are few boats, a couple of small towns and there’s not even a road fully encircling it. At Gl...