We were all up early for our big hike. Francesca woke up with the flu, so no hiking for her. Andrea stayed with her. So Antonio, Eric and Christi set off to the Italian Alps. From the little we have seen of Milan so far, it looks nothing like any other place we have been to in Italy. It is a modern city, with mostly newer buildings. The roads are wide, like almost as wide as in America. The cars are bigger than we have seen anywhere else in Europe. It is a pleasant place with tree lined streets. Milan was heavily bombed in WWII by both the Allies and the Axis, so there aren’t a lot of historical areas left and they were able to rebuild a more contemporary city.

It was yet another perfect day, with sunshine, clear skies, and comfortably warm weather for autumn. We headed north out of the city. Once out of town, the landscape started to remind us a lot of upstate New York. There are tons of broad leafed trees that are beginning to change color. Most of the leaves are still green, but occasionally, there will be a burst of crimson and gold from a tree here and there. Where there aren’t trees, there are fields of green grass or farmland, mostly corn. The towns are small but consistent, and totally cute.

When we were less than an hour from the Swiss border, Eric got a phone call from the Monaco Harbor Master. He demanded to know why we hadn’t moved our boat yet. Eric told him that we had planned to stay for a week, and when he checked in, they said a week was fine. The Harbor Master said he was under the impression we were only staying one night and wanted to know who had told us we could stay for a week. Of course, we couldn’t remember a name. He told us to come in right away to clear up the matter. When we said we couldn’t come in until tomorrow, he sounded most displeased. He told us to be at the office at 0700 in the morning in a kind of “or else” manner. Sigh. We’d have to take the train back tonight instead of tomorrow night. Darn it.

We called Andrea and had him check the train schedules. It wasn’t going to work out for us to go back today because the last train out was hours before we’d return to Milan. Our only option was the 0700 train tomorrow, which put us in Monaco at 1130. Eric called back and left a message for the Harbor Master that we would be there at noon. Our plan had been to spend tomorrow sightseeing in Milan and then take the last train back to Monaco, and we were really sad that we were going to miss out on Milan’s sights. But at least we were going to enjoy the Italian Alps today, so the trip to Milan was still worth it.

The farther north we went, the more evergreens began to appear in and amongst the broad leafed trees. We passed Lake Maggiore, a beautiful, quite large lake. Andrea had grown up in a town on this lake. From the lake, we took the historic Sempione highway, built by Napoleon at the beginning of the 19th century after he conquered northern Italy. The incline began to get noticeably steeper. The pitch on the buildings got sharper the higher we went, and the buildings started to look more like what you would imagine Switzerland to look like. There were ancient looking buildings intermixed with modern buildings. And there were a lot of houses. Not small apartment complexes, but actual single family stand alone houses, which you don’t see a lot in European towns. At some point we turned off onto a smaller road, which took us to the Valdivedro Valley in .

The traditional style of construction here is the lower half of the building is made of irregular stone, the upper half is made of wood, and the roof is a wooden frame topped with flat flagstone type stones. The traditional houses are charming, like something out of a postcard. The farther up we got, the more houses were in the traditional style and less that were made from more modern construction techniques. Also, the higher we got, the smaller the towns became, until eventually the towns were so small that we drove from end to end in a couple of minutes. The last real town we went through is called Trasquera, a picturesque agrarian community. 

We continued to climb higher and higher. We came to a beautiful bridge called Ponte del Diavolo (Devil Bridge). It is 105 meters above the creek below. It was started in the late 1800’s and finished in the early 1900’s, and was an engineering feat in its day. To make the bridge, they built a wooden platform all the way up, made the bridge, then burned the platform down. Unfortunately, in this photo you get zero sense of how tall this bridge is and what an amazing feat it was to build it back then. Why they built it is a curiosity. The road ends just beyond the bridge and there are only a handful of people who live there.

The road ended not too far beyond the bridge at a small village called Bugliaga located only a few kilometers from the Swiss border. There are maybe a couple dozen houses and a church all spread around, with a dirt trail to their doors. All the houses look lived in. We were surrounded on all sides by steep mountains, and the highest peaks, standing a grandiose 3,000 – 4,000 meters tall on the Swiss side of the border, were covered in snow. It was majestic looking. The grass was green and there were still some wildflowers in bloom. There are a variety of evergreens, but the dominant one looks like a pine with tiny needles and pine cones. The little pinecones are cute. The first shot is one of the towns is the village, the second shot is the view of Vallese, Switzerland. Look carefully at the bottom of the second shot and you can see another house in the village.

We started up a marked hiking trail. It was really steep. We passed the clearing with all the houses and followed the trail into the forest of mostly evergreens. Christi was huffing and puffing, having a hard time getting up the hill. We mentioned a few days ago that Christi had a mild cold. At this point, she was pretty much over the cold, but she had a lot of residual congestion. The residual congestion was making it harder to breathe, and she naturally doesn’t breathe very well to begin with. However, the scenery was so gorgeous that it was worth every single step. Progress up the hill was painfully slow because she was having such a hard time. It was also surprisingly warm. Given that there was snow on the mountains so close by, we expected it to be freezing cold, and dressed for the cold.

As we trudged up, we”¦ to be continued”¦