The Dolomites Of Italy By Motorcycle - Unknown Mountain Passes On The BMW R1250

Good morning from the Dolomites. We actually had a lion this morning so we're fully rested and ready for today and it's another splendid day here in Cortina. We're just going to go downstairs now get some breakfast then we're going to have a little pack up and not taking too much stuff with us today. We're going to be riding really light as we have a second night in the same hotel so it's going to be another great day today. We are um we're on the freaking bike again. Yeah we're on the bike again aren't we? You hadn't noticed already. Tell them we're on the bike again. So we have left all of the panniers and all the heavy luggage at the hotel and we have just got the top box on for today's little ride out. We're going to be doing a route around the Monte Cristello mountain and hopefully going to be heading to a lake later, that's the plan. So far the traffic on the path has been quite a lot. There's a cycling event on today so it's been a bit busy on the road but uh weather's perfect, mountains are in full full grandeur. Yeah we're well rested after last night. We actually had a nice lie in and it's very unusual for us to be staying at the same hotel twice but the Dolomites are a perfect location to have a base when you're in smack bang in the middle. Cortina is a good spot for that as well because it's got a nice little town centre as well. It's going to be a good day isn't it? It's going to be an awesome day. So this is Strada Stradale di Amagdala. And you're kind of heading around um one of the big Dolomites which is the Monte Cristello and we're coming up to the little bit of twisty section now where there's I think three or four switchback hairpins but they're all quite nice, quite sweepy ones. Yeah there's nothing too dramatic here, it's quite a relaxing ride. Today we're headed to the Kreuzberg Pass. It has a second name in Italian, I can't remember what that is. I think that roughly translates cross mountain or mountain cross. So this is a new pass for us, we've not done this one before, it should be good. It's a little bit cooler today as well, it's 20 degrees. Yeah I think there's a weather front moving in, we've just been hit by some quite dark clouds but I think we'll go for an overtaking. Yeah, the one thing I don't like about these Dolomites is how many other people are here. Let's seize the overtaking opportunity as well if we can. Yeah. This is a lot quieter this road than the other ones. It was quite busy today on the way down here but this road doesn't seem to be so popular as it's completely clear, so maybe a good option if it's a busy day somewhere. The Kreuzberg Pass is a good one to take. They've done a lot of resurfacing around the Dolomite region since we've last been here maybe a year or so ago. This is brand new, I think this can't have been laid more than a couple of months or something. It actually looks that new that it looks slippy. It almost smells new as well, can you smell that in the air? Yeah I can smell that, maybe it was laid this week. The speed limits around the Dolomites are very generous, generally speaking it's 90 kilometers an hour throughout the whole region, which is really fast. Although if there's plenty of camper vans and cyclists in the way you might not be able to keep those speeds up, but generally speaking if you have a clear road 90 kilometers an hour is more than enough to have fun on these roads. Just seeing the road ahead on the map there, it looks really good. Big sweepers, the mountains there on our right. I think we're keeping them on our right and working our way clockwise around them. It should bring us back to Cortina in the end. If not, we'll just have to ride them again. I don't think we'll have any complaints from from us if we have to do them again. The friends that are with us are very eager to ride. We offered to stop a couple of times back there for a coffee or something and they refused and said carry on going. So that's good, that's the kind of people we like. They are doing loads of work on these roads at the moment, you can see there's quite a few traffic lights on the roads while they're doing the road works. But what is awesome about it is that the road surface they're putting down is fantastic and they're putting so much effort into it. You can see the barriers at the side, they're metal, where they're doing the new sections. They're actually wrapping them in wood panels really, which is awesome to see. It looks so natural doesn't it Sean? It does, it just blends in with the surroundings, the wooden caps on them, they're really good. On to another pass now that we can't remember the name of but we will link it. It is Passo Santo Antonio. These passes are a lot quieter aren't they? This one's empty, it is great. I've never heard of this pass, we just stumbled across this one and it looks great. It's a nasty little turn off the main road though. Yeah it is. It's like you have to do a u-turn almost. Possibly why it's so quiet. It can be, yeah everyone just misses the turn off for it. So something I'm really grateful about this suit, it's the Campanero World Traveller, is it's available in longer lengths as well, which I have the longer jacket and it's really good because if you look at my arm, my wrist is actually fully covered from the sun. That's a problem I've had in the past, is I'd end up with these like little rings around my wrist which would be quite burnt from the sun. I ended up wearing socks in the end to bridge the gap but these have got really nice long arms, even like fully stretched out there, it's all covered which is great. That's one less thing to worry about. Right we're back where we started in Cortina, you can just about see the Olympic rings in the background there. That was a great ride, it was a couple of hours, two or three hours I think in total. We did quite a few passes there and some fantastic roads. I'm going to have to note them down later so I can go back another day. But the girls just gone to get some food from the supermarket, we're going to take it back to the hotel and we're going to have lunch outside on the grass, it's in a nice area there. Bikes are doing great, just parked up there for the time being and Evan's shot off into the city centre to go and get himself a souvenir. I'm getting rather hungry now so looking forward to lunch. I think the plan for today is to chill out for the rest of the day, we're going to have an easy afternoon after lunch and probably walk down into town to stretch the legs out a bit. So it's a lovely place, the weather's fantastic, we couldn't ask for any more at the moment. So after cooking lunch back at the hotel we headed back into Cortina, we spent the afternoon there looking around the shops, relaxing, had a few drinks there and then eventually we went to have a look for dinner which wasn't as easy as it might have sounded. As you might have gathered it has a gluten intolerance and so we looked for anywhere that would cater for that. Unfortunately there was almost no options in the whole town there and where there was, the food was very very overly priced. I mean we don't mind paying for what you get like but most of the stuff there was, if you look at the asterisks, was from frozen not fresh and yeah when they're charging 20-30 euros for a pizza with a bit of tomato sauce on or a bit of pasta with some tomato sauce it's just not worth it and it's not going to fill you up. So we decided to cook again, so we went back to the supermarket, got some ingredients up and Em cooked up a treat tonight. We sat out on the garden just outside the hotel there, we had 360 views of the Dolomite Alps, it was absolutely really special, we stayed there till the sun went down. It's about 11.30 now so we have just packed up the panniers because tomorrow we're going to have to head off nice and early because we're heading all the way to Ljubljana in Slovenia tomorrow and we want to go all of the B roads and there's a few nice little passes we're going to take on the way. So we're going to get up around about 7, breakfast at 7.30 and we aim to be on the road by 8.30 tomorrow. Weather looks good again, we did have a little thunderstorm today which cleared the air a bit so hopefully there won't be any more rain tomorrow. So we're going to go to bed now, catch a bit of sleep and we'll catch you again in the morning as we journey to Slovenia.