This is the view from our hotel room balcony. I’m going to give this hotel my number one vote, particularly cycle friendly.

From the moment we arrived, the bike room, the room, the view, the staff, the food…. Melodia Hotel, Alta Badia. they also lead a few rides a day in the area and have hire bikes available.

As we were checking out, the manager came to see where we were riding today and asked to check our route for today and tomorrow.

Today, we had originally planned to ride Sella Ronda (minus most of the gear), pick the gear up and move on to our next night in Brunico.

The weather was not suitable for high altitude riding, wet, cold and sleety, nor was our inclination present, so we decided to follow his route with a side way hillier ride to Brunico that he also said was safer avoiding tunnels he said are ‘lots worse’ than Lake Garda’s.

We started by heading down the valley 10 km, then deviating and climbing 6.5 km, and boy that seemed harder than it ought, indicating our legs had not recovered from the previous days mammoth climbing effort.

We were stopped in a small traffic jam as this helicopter brought in steel for work on the side of the hill.

Looking towards Brunico it still looked ok. Nice green pastures, groomed fields.

It started raining with about 14 km to go. We ended up in Brunico on a gravel cycle path. our nice clean bikes, courtesy of Tony, now had wet gravel all over them. He was unimpressed.

We found our hotel by the river. The male receptionist asked for us to bring our gear inside off the bike before showing where the bikes would go. I explained the gear was wet and dirty, did he had an old towel we could place them on so as not to get his floor dirty.

No, so in came the muddy gear. I try to treat these places like I would my own home but sometimes they do not care as I guess it is not their job to clean it.

It rained for hours and we eventually went to the supermarket using their umbrellas for supplies, then headed out for some dinner.

So that’s it for today. A longer day tomorrow, with rain forecast, hopefully still later in the day.