Report from Graham Orchard
We woke up this morning to glorious sunshine so planned a day with our good friend Magnus. We thought we’d spend the morning having a drive on some of the local mountain roads to take in some of the amazing scenery the Dolomites have to offer before a lunch stop and then a trip on one of the many cable cars around Cortina d’Ampezzo, aiming for one that we hadn’t visited on previous Cortinas to Cortina runs.
We set off in no particular direction and soon found ourselves on a road with some very steep inclines and hairpin corners, just what we were aiming for! It wasn’t all that long before we spotted a carpark with a chairlift – or should that be a chairlift with a carpark? – so we pulled in and had a ride on the lift up to the Cinque Torri.
We didn’t know it at the time, but we had stumbled on the exact same place as Michiel and Bert (MkIII Crayford) had visited the previous day, but what we did know was the views in front of us were quite simply stunning. The chairlift took us to the area of the five towers (and the cafe and restaurants), a fantastic sight in itself but we wanted to see everything from the top, around a 30 minute walk away.
We found the paths up to the top were pretty steep and fairly hard going in places with large sections of the surface quite loose, but the climb up was well worth it for the amazing views across the valleys to the next peaks. From up high, we looked down to see another chairlift which appeared to come up from a very twisty road. Straight away Magnus decided that’s where we would be heading for when we got back to the cars.
After a quick drink in the cafe while checking out the maps to find that twisty road we were on the chairlift heading back to the cars to be back on our way again.
It took us a while to drive around the mountain to get to that twisty road, especially when we had to keep on stopping for pictures of the cars with the deep blue skies and stunning mountain backdrop.
One picture that absolutely needed taking was of the back of the MkII next to the warning sign for the very twisty sections of road. In the UK our road signs have a 100E on them, but could it really be these Italian signs have a MkII Cortina showing? It certainly looked like it to us!
It really was a great drive out and we had totally lost track of time in the process. It was way past 2pm by the time we finally realised we hadn’t yet stopped for lunch and of course most places had closed for the afternoon by then. In the end it must have been around 3pm before we had the very welcome sight of an open restaurant, a nice place with good food and more great views for taking yet more car and hillside photos.
It was very late afternoon by the time we were making our way back towards our base in Cortina. We had long since given up on the idea of going up in a cable car overlooking the town but there was one more photo we each had to get taken – the proof that we had indeed made it to Cortina once again.
All in all, another amazing visit to Cortina d’Ampezzo had been made but we were sad this would be our last day in the area we knew there was another great drive to be had on the way to our next stop at Lake Garda.
All photos © Cortina MkII Owners Club LTD unless otherwise stated
