World Tour: Monday July 11th 2022

Today was our free day, so we decided to take the Telecabine up to Pradel, which is 1000m above Molveno. We had a leisurely start this morning, and then slogged up the road to the Telecabine. It was hot already though it was only 10 o’clock, so I had to use the umbrella as a sunshade. I had forgotten to put suncream on my neck yesterday and it is red and painful. It was a very long hot climb, and when we got there, there were 3 long flights of stairs to climb as well. There were lifts, but they were marked for for pushchairs and disabled people only. Being very old obviously wasn’t being disabled so we climbed! The little cabins would have held 6 or 8 people, but there was nobody else there, so we had one to ourselves. The views on the way up were quite spectacular.

Our hotel is on the steeper left side of the town, rather than the flatter right side.

Once at Pradel, we wandered a little to look at the views, before setting off up the track to the ski lift to go further up. It was quite a new experience getting on a ski lift without my boots and skis on!

From higher up, you could hardly even see the lake, just the surrounding mountains.

And the mountains behind us were higher, bare and rocky.

We met quite a few of our party in the restaurant, where I had a fruit smoothie. We though about going for a walk, but the slopes were steep and stony, and there was quite a wind, so no umbrella for shade. It was nice and cool though! Somebody had carved 3 little old men into the stumps of two trees.

We got back on the ski lift to go down. The views were even better going down.

You can see the lifts were not at all crowded - probably most people have gone to the beach. This part of the mountain is very popular with mountain bikers though. The ski lift has a hook on the right of the chair support to hang your bike over. The mountain bike tracks are clearly marked, and we did see a few people going down.

I didn’t get a photo of any though. There weren’t many, perhaps it’s too hot. The sky was full of people doing paragliding though. There’s one in this photo, on the top right.

Once off the ski lift, we walked in the pine forest for a while, along a little track called the bear trail. The forest was thick and cool and the slopes on both sides of the track were steep. There were no views to photograph and no bears, fortunately. Eventually, we made our way back to the Telecabine and came back down to Molveno. It was fiercely hot again and we stumbled back down the hill to the hotel where we fell on the bed, and, in my case, fell asleep for the afternoon.

When it was a bit cooler, we went to inspect the swimming pools. We tried the indoor one.