Plocken Pass on a foggy day

The great things about having a GPS is that you are almost never lost.  The less than great thing is that, once in a while, the GPS will send you on a very, shall we say, strange, choice of routes.  If you rely too much on that GPS, you don't really how "off" that route is, until you are already a hundred or so kilometers away from the more traditional route.

So, you are in Kufstein, Austria and you need to get to Venice, Italy.  Your GPS is set to take you on eh fastest route available, and not mind tolls or vignettes or the like.  The "norm" would be a four and a half hour drive via Innsbruck and over the Brenner Pass (using the tunnel, not all the way over).

Yeah, well, our navi wanted a little more interesting ride than THAT last week.  Which is how we found ourselves with some pretty awesome views of the totally incredible Dolomites (limestone peaks which rise vertically, and very dramatically out of the alps):

And, after our two lane, but reasonable flat and easy to navigate road gave way to a more curvy, mountain road, filled with a large numbers of bikers (I cannot imagine being bale to bike UP that!  My brother and sister in law, and nephew, are in that kind of shape.  wow.).  

We were on the little bitty Plockenpass and the road was getting twistier and twistier.  It was interesting watching this RV try to back out of the way so the semi could make the hair pin turn.  Can you imagine driving a semi on that road???  Note,  there was another road to take higher on--I assume these big vehicles did not stay on the pass we took.  I do not think they would have fit in the tunnels.

An it just got crazier from there.  See that mass of blue in the photo below?  That is the Navi screen showing so many hair pin turns that it almost looks like one crazy blob:

Here is a photo which I found online that shows how tightly the road switches back on itself:  

Going back down afterwards was actually MUCH worse, but I was too busy trying not to panic to photograph the screen.  THANK GOODNESS Dave was driving (pull overs spots were pretty rare).  I did get one photo of how dense the fog was though:

A gazillion hair pin turns later, the fog was lifting (or, more like we were once again below the cloud) an we got to a pull over, which I made Dave take because SOMEone was burning out their brakes and I wanted to be 100% positive it was not us (it wasn't).

Once down from the pass, the rest of the drive was uneventful.  We stopped for some shopping at a huge outlet mall outside of Venice (we wanted to get a Ferrari shirt to bring home to Rio) and arrived at our hotel (more of a pizzeria that happens to also have a hotel; it did not even say hotel anywhere outside!) around 8:00.  

The room was small, but very clean.  The owner was super nice, and the pizzaria was FANTASTIC.  Not bad at all for a reasonably priced hotel near Venice.  Dinner (a big one, with wine and soda) and room came to less than 80 Euro total, even with the breakfast buffet (a small one, though good by Italian breakfast standards).

Up next, our week on the Splendour of the Seas!

--Hadley