It has been a bit of a day of contrasts – city to country, hot to cold, dry to wet, high to really high, and trains to buses to cable cars. It is kind of hard to take it all in.

We started out this morning in Trento in our posh hotel. Trento is in a mountainous area, and our hotel had grand views from the patio where we ate breakfast. Poor Meredith – when I found a four-star hotel for a hundred euros a night (about 130 dollars), I was pleased. When we were upgraded to a two-hundred-euro suite for free, I was smug. When we saw the huge breakfast buffet with yogurts, four kinds of croissants, four kinds of breads, fruit, cereals, and five kinds of dessert, I was pretty much insufferable. In my defense, Mer had given me a slightly hard time when she saw I had booked a four-star hotel. She managed to put up with my ego by soothing herself with three kinds of croissants.

We left the hotel and caught a city bus down to the castle, where we got off and found Richard’s church. Its members welcomed us quite warmly, and told us to sit in the back where we could get an English translation of everything by listening to headphones. It turned out that on this Sunday, Richard was translating. The church was pretty full, with about eighty people or so, and a bunch of kids – it is a very young church. Two of the five songs sung during the service were songs to which Mer and I knew the English words, so we sang those while the others sang in Italian. The sermon was based on a passage in Galatians where Paul talks about faith in Jesus versus dependence on the law. The pastor applied that to modern life as well, and warned that even Christians have a tendency to fall back on making rules that add to the gospel, when we really need to depend on Jesus. He likened it to a sickness treated with drugs that mask the symptoms as opposed to going to the surgeon to have the sickness cured. He stressed that we need Jesus to cure the sickness, and we need to keep relying on him.
We ducked out of church just as a children’s presentation was starting for Sunday school – we wanted to catch a train that left around 12:50, and we were afraid we would miss it if we stayed much later. We got our tickets, and had about twenty minutes to lounge about, so we sat in Piazza Dante, where we enjoyed the breeze (church had been really hot for some reason).

We took the train north (and up) to Bolzano, which is a good-sized city at the start of the Dolomites, a rugged mountain area. We grabbed a bus that went up and up and up through some hair-raising turns on a mountain road, with some amazing vistas. We jumped off the bus up in the mountains near Castelrotto, where we got tickets for a long cable-car ride up through spectacular views. When we got to the top in Compatsch, we waited for another bus; the wait allowed us to soak it all in – we were surrounded by steep and often bare rock cliffs, some with snow still on them. It started to rain very lightly, on and off, but not enough to dampen our spirits. We got our last bus, which took us to our last cable car, which was really a fancy chair lift. We got lucky here – the lift was still running. It closed at 5:00, and it was 4:20, so that was okay. But once we got on it, it started raining harder, and when we were about three quarters of the way up, there were two flashes of lightning. Once we got off, they shut the lift down. We had passed isolated snow patches on the way up, and we were more or less eye-level with sides of mountains that still had good amounts of snow on them.

By now it was raining pretty hard, and we had a ten-minute walk to our hotel. Happily, we had only gone a minute or so when the lift operator drove by and gave us a lift to the hotel, which was very appreciated.
The hotel is a beautiful alpine structure with lots of exposed wood, located at 2054 meters (6700 feet). Since the temperature was only in the low forties when we arrived, they had the heat on, which was quite welcome. We checked in and dumped the bags, and went back to the bar for hot chocoalte. Once we were warmed up, I borrowed an umbrella (Mer has one), and, largely on Mer’s prompting, we went out on a ninety-minute walk along the dirt roads. We looked at some of the trails along the way, but they were either muddy, under water, or both. The dirt-road walk was fine, if wet. The views were breathtaking in all directions – there were mountains and rushing streams and lots of evergreen trees and moutain fields. It was such a pity it was raining, but it was still amazing. We found occational patches of snow on the side of the road, probably left over from piles made by the snow plow. Mer may have been hit by a snowball in June.

We got back to the hotel, slightly cold, slightly more wet, but quite happy. We stopped by the goat pen (containing goats with bells), where we were delighted to see one-day-old goats with their moms. They were tiny, and very cute. We popped up to our room, where we changed clothing, and went downstairs for supper, which was included in our stay. It was a four-course meal (Including dessert), and was excellent. The dessert, mille foglie, was perhaps the best non-chocolate dessert I have ever had.

Sadly, it was still raining after supper, so Mer and I decided to stay cozy and warm. We hope it will be dry tomorrow morning before we head out, but even if it not, the journey here was amazing and worth all the trouble.