Tuesday, July 8th, 2014

Still raining this morning, good thing we went on our hike yesterday! Charlotte and I got up long before Mark and Genevieve so we went all around town and found a bakery where we got a strudel (not nearly as good as the one in Verona), and bread and eggs. Once everyone was up and fed we headed out to Bolzano. Traffic once we got to Bolzano was just plain stopped, when we finally (literally 45 minutes later) got up to what the problem was a truck had knocked over a motorcycle that was blocking the street. Why they didn’t just move the motorcycle is a mystery to me. The GPS directions put us going right into the traffic congested zone (where you get fined if you don’t have a permit). Mark wanted to continue on anyway but Genevieve and I convinced him to back up. Hopefully we did it in time and won’t be receiving our forwarded traffic ticket from the car rental agency any day now! We found parking close by and stopped by a bakery (second of the day) where we each got a baked good so we could delay lunch a bit. Next we went to the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology where Otzi the Iceman is. That line (in the rain) took about an hour and a half. The kids decided to amuse themselves by giving each other Parks and Recreation trivia quizzes. This pretty much was torture for me. We did finally make it into the museum (which wasn’t even crowded, they so could have let more people in) and saw the whole exhibit. Otzi himself is pretty creepy, but the clothes and tools they found with him are fascinating. Very worthwhile visit.

Next up we had to try to find lunch. Bolzano is apparently a shopping town because every chain store in Europe had a store there. Too bad we were all shopped out! Restaurants open at 2:00 were a little harder to come by. After walking all around the town and even stopping at the tourist office for information, we would up at the first place we had checked out a menu at. They were able to seat us inside and the food was pretty good so I’m not sure what I didn’t like about it when I first saw it. I actually had my best pizza of the trip here, spicy salami and some sweet/spicy pepper that was really good.

After lunch I maybe would have wanted to walk around a bit but Mark was pretty cranky and it was still raining, so we just stopped at The Assumption of Our Lady cathedral. Very nice church. On our way back to the car we passed another Loacker store, even bigger than the one in Verona. We picked out single serving packages of everything they sold out of bins, there is sure a lot more product than I knew they had. We are even more Loacker fans now.

We got back to the car and back to the aparthotel and the kids went to the pool while Mark and I went to the bar and had a drink. We decided to skip dinner because we’d had such a late lunch and we weren’t fans of the cuisine anyway.

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