We just returned from our (now) annual European trip around the Alps and it was incredible. I'm still on a high from just how amazing it was...and kind of heartbroken that it's over and hungry for more.
Back in November, I was scouting airfare into Milan and it really wasn't budging price-wise. We definitely knew we wanted to go to the Dolomites in Italy, but had the flexibility to fly into about a dozen different airports...none of which were "cheap". I looked into Munich, Innsbruck, Geneva, Zurich, Venice...I was determined to get a good deal, so I started searching other airports and connecting flights and end up finding tickets for $360 into Brussels, Belgium. Further research discovered round trip tickets from Brussels to Milan for $29, so I booked them and started planning.
The Alps are included in eight different countries, and we were intent on going to each and every one :) Initially, we looked into train tickets, but at over $1000 each, I had to find another option, and a camper van seemed like the perfect compromise. Unlimited mileage, the option to travel anywhere, sleeping accommodations, and a mobile little kitchen sealed the deal, so I booked a camper with a chemical toilet, shower, and wifi from Indiecampers.
Once we landed in Milan, we met up with Indiecampers and arrived to their warehouse where our lime green painted camper van was waiting for us. Our first stop was a grocery store where we stocked up on pasta, eggs, coffee and cream, water, meat, bug spray, and a grabbed a toothbrush (I'd left our electric one at Brian's parents' house :()...then we hit the road. Here is a little map with a rough outline of our route over the next 12 days.
The beauty of this trip was that, since we had a camper, we really had total flexibility with our schedule. I hadn't made any reservations and really didn't have an itinerary set up, I just knew we wanted to be in the mountains as much as possible, see the Mediterranean, and we wanted to check each of the eight countries off of our list. Once on the highway, we tossed around the option of going to Verona and Venice, but decided to head straight to the mountains instead. I'm not a huge fan of cities and we figured it would be hard to find parking and deal with the crowds, so we turned off right before Verona along Lago di Garda in an attempt to find a parking spot. We'd gotten an app with camping information, but it took us into a little village and, eventually into a little old couple's driveway and we quickly found out that nobody in those little mountain villages speak English of any kind. We ventured into a good-sized town on the outskirts of a quarry, so the town was full of massive blocks of stone and fountains and sculptures. We ended up along the side of a dirt road on a cliff surrounded by vineyards and, after parking the camper, decided to explore up the road. We could see the Alps rising up through a canyon ahead of us, and up the road was a creepy abandoned hotel, windmills, and endless rolling hills of vineyards and the lake. We walked between the grape vines and wallowed in the poppies and explored the headstones (Brian had an app on his phone that would translate the engravings so we could actually read them) of various randomly-placed graves. Then we hit the sack and slept like rocks.
The next morning, we hit the road again and decided to go to Lago Di Braies, a place that was on my list of non-negotiable must-sees for the trip. We opted to take the highway up, but the views were still pretty incredible.
Go ahead and refer to my next post for details and pics from our evening at the lake...it was so stunning and incredible and magical that it really deserves it's own post...plus, I had to post pretty much every single picture I took:)