views Archives - Dave and Sara’s Excellent 2018 Adventure

Fair Verona

By David on Monday, March 26, 2018

Yesterday and today we’ve been in Verona. Yesterday was fun because it was Palm Sunday and the city was full of people. We walked around quite a bit and saw the Arena from the outside and also Piazza delle Erbe where the city was hosting a kind of science/environmental fair for kids. The weather is nice and all the cafes and restaurants are full. We had a very light lunch at a cute tavern called Osteria Al La. We spent the early evening relaxing in the hotel, when we checked in we got upgraded to a suite that’s pretty spacious. It also is very heavy on the gold accents.

We had a seafood dinner at Osteria Bertoldo in the historic city center, we got a little turned around on the way there so we ended up seeing quite a bit of the center on the way. After dinner we finished with a nightcap at our hotel in front of the fireplace.

Today we went to Juliet’s balcony with all the school children in all of Italy who are apparently here today for a field trip. It was a brief visit. This isn’t a photo of the balcony but all of the walls near the balcony are covered in hearts.

This is the Castle.

We also went to the Arena which is still used a concert and opera venue. Unfortunately we are missing the upcoming production by a few days. Interestingly, the Arena has perfect acoustics so they don’t mike the productions. In fact, today we were way up at the top of the amphitheater and could hear one of the workmen sawing through a 2×4 down in the center.

Tomorrow we leave for Venice, our last stop (sad face).

Italy Road Trip

Castles to Terraces

By Dave and Sara on Friday, March 9, 2018

So dinner last night was only OK. It was nice to eat just protein and not a pasta. That being said, Dave woke up in the middle of the night with stomach pains. Maybe the seafood wasn’t good? Luckily, it just cost him a little bit of sleep. When he woke up, the stomach pain was gone.

‘This morning, we hiked up to the Castle Rocca Minore. It is about a 10 minute walk from where we are staying mostly uphill. The castle looks over the entire town of Assisi and has some good views.

From the top we can still see some snow on the top of the hills from the freak snow storm that hit last week. After catching some views, we hiked back down to the town.

Today the sun is actually out and it is nearly 60 degrees. From the wet cold days of before, this basically feels like summer. We grabbed a bottle of wine and some to go focaccia and took it back to our place to sit out on the terrace. We spent the rest of the day up here enjoying the sun.

Tonight we go to dinner at Osteria Piazzetta dell’Erba. Tomorrow we have our longest drive yet to Rome at 3 hours where we will be meeting up with Matt and Anna. We are quite excited!

Italy Road Trip

Francesco I think they mean Francisco

By Dave and Sara on Thursday, March 8, 2018

This morning we woke up with the plan to see the large church built to house the remains of Francesco.

After walking through the town, we made it to the church and queued up our Rick Steve’s guided tour audio and set about the church.

It is quite impressive how large and the number of Frescos here.

Francesco started the Franciscan movement and also appreciated nature including animals.

After the church, Sara wasn’t feeling too hot. The cold we both battled has turned out to be quite a doozy. Therefore, we took a scenic walk back to the apartment and stopped to get the fixings to make some vegetable soup. After lunch, we tried to take it is easy so Sara can rest up and feel better.

Tonight we have to dinner at Ristorante il Vicoletto.

Italy Road Trip

I Guess We Are Shipping Wine

By Dave and Sara on Tuesday, March 6, 2018

After struggling to find something to eat for lunch yesterday and enjoying our home aperitivo, we headed on the town to find something to eat for dinner. We ended up at Ristorante La Bricola next door to where we ate dinner the first night. To be honest, we were a bit underwhelmed by the food. Additionally, the bottle of wine we got was border line turned, but we waited too long before we both agreed it wasn’t good.

This morning we woke up and saw that a glimmer of hope that the rain would finally subside. Unfortunately, we were wrong.

Luckily for us, we had a fun day planned of wine tasting and eating Italian food so it didn’t matter what the weather was like. Our first stop was Montemecurio just outside of town. When we pulled up, a scruffy teenager with an eye patch wearing sweat pants answered the door and looked at us very confused. Concerned we had pulled up to somebody’s house and not a winery, we started to slowly backup. In broken English, the teenager told us to wait. After waiting outside the front door for two minutes, Irene came out and welcomed us into the house. While it looked like a house, it was indeed the correct place. The wine operation consists of 3 people. One for the field, one for the winery, and one for the office. Irene was an absolute pleasure to taste with. She was quite gregarious and loved talking with us about skiing. She stressed the importance of a bit of grappa before you hit the slopes. Here we tasted 6 bottles of wine include a white and rose which is very rare in this red dominated region. Everything was delicious and so affordable. We ended up walking away with a half case.

After our first tasting, we headed to our lunch reservation in Monticchiello at Osteria La Porta.

Apparently, most people come to this little hill top village just for this restaraunt. We were not disappointed. Between the bacalla appetizier or the Cacio Pepe Gnocchi, everything was so good. The atmosphere was also quite fun with a young temptress sitting behind us attempting to seduce the young waiter. This included passing notes and lots of giggling. Sara said she could have dressed cuter. The staff was also quite generous here, they even gave us our half liter of wine for free.

After lunch, we headed back to the apartment for a quick rest before our next tasting. Dave fell asleep during this time for a few minutes, because as you know, tasting wine is exhausting. Refreshed and ready to go, we headed up to Gattevechi which is located right in town.

We met Daniela who is the one of three siblings who run the winery. In addition to working in the family business, Daniela used to teach Italian to foreign students at a school in Montepulciano so she was very excited about speaking with Sara and complimented her quite a bit on her Italian. They also spoke about their shared interest in vintage Cinecitta films. Similar to other places in town, they had an extensive cellar that dates back to 300 BC.

After touring their small crypt, we tasted the wines. Again, everything was quite good. Daniella offered to help us ship all of our wine back including the bottles we purchased at other locations.

All in all, we ended up with two cases.

During our tasting, it finally stopped raining and the sun came out. We now sit in our apartment for one last night and are looking at a beautiful sunset. Tonight we are going to cook in.

Tomorrow we head to Assisi.

Italy Road Trip

Under the Tuscan Sun

By Dave and Sara on Sunday, March 4, 2018

The sun was shining this morning in Florence as we packed up for our next part of the trip.

There were lots of people out and about enjoying the weather, biking and running. We had a quick breakfast at the hotel and drove out of town in the direction of Siena with the hilltop town of Montepulciano our destination for today. The route out of Florence took us up into the hills on the Oltrearno side of town by the Pitti Palace and then into the Tuscan countryside. We passed lots of wineries and farms, a bike race and some very heavy industrial zones. When Sara spotted San Giminigano from the highway we decided to take a detour and stop there to look around. It was quiet and parking was easy so we spent an hour or so walking around and even had a gelato because the sun was out and it has warmed up considerably.

We got to admire all the towers and medieval alleys pretty much by ourselves. Sara also made this classic Cinecitta tribute short video

Leaving San Giminigano we got back on the highway, passing by Siena and Volterra on our way to Montepulciano. When we got into town our super nice Airbnb host, Lucca met us and caravanned with us up to the apartment because it’s in a restricted traffic area. This town is so cool and the apartment location is great. You enter the town about halfway down the hill and the walls enclose the rest of it around the top of the hill. The apartment is on the edge of town so the view out the windows is down onto the valley and smaller hills. Also, one of the big cantinas producing vino Nobile (the local wine) is literally across the street from the front door. We walked around a little and had lunch in at a very nice place called Le Lodge di Vignola. The plan was to eat dinner in but all the grocery stores in town are closed because it’s Sunday afternoon so we will probably have a light dinner out. Tomorrow the plan is to take a drive through the surrounding country and visit a winery in the afternoon.

Champoluc Zermatt

Heliskiing Revisted

By Dave and Sara on Thursday, February 22, 2018

So we were pretty tired yesterday, so we left a very short post. Sorry about that, we were really tired. So here is how yesterday went.

Jeff, Sara, and Dave woke up and were all nervously excited about our day ahead. We got dressed and under Dave’s direction showed up to our first lift 30 minutes early. We took the funicular up followed by two chairs. Once we got to the top, we had a short hike to reach the area where the helicopter picks us up. We met our guide Loris and he took all of our skis and tied them in to a bundle. As the helicopter arrived our skis were placed in the rack and we all jumped aboard. Within seconds, the helicopter was off. As we pulled away, the force of acceleration and turning was quite intense and we all looked at each other in excitement. The video yesterday doesn’t really do justice to how amazing the view was, weaving in and out of the peaks just below 14K feet. Once we got to the top, we quickly unloaded and dropped to the ground to allow for the helicopter to take off. The whole process was quite organized with the helicopter only on the ground for pickup/drop off for no longer than 15 seconds. The ride was so short we thought there might have been a mix up and that we weren’t actually going to drop down into Zermatt but we were actually in the right place, high up along a ridge line separating Italy and Switzerland.

From there, we clipped into our skis and started a very long traverse around the peak to reach the Col that drops into Zermatt. At the top of the Col as the resort came into view, we realized how much higher we were than the Klien Matterhorn Tram which is the highest ski lift in Europe (3800m). Once we finished our traverse the wide open Col was somewhat chopped up but the snow conditions were quite nice. The powder was maybe mid shin deep. Once we got a bit lower, our guide took us off the beaten path to an area of wide open untracked powder. He said he preferred not to follow the tracks. We said that was fine by us.

There wasn’t anywhere to place a Jake sticker in all that wide open but we brought one just the same.

Once we got to the bottom of the glacier we were back in Zermatt where had we started our trip back on February 2nd. It was quite surreal to be back on the lifts where we started this trip. We took the Matterhorn Glacier Express and the Klien Matterhorn backup to the top and headed towards Cervinia to ski back to Champoluc. As this area sits in the sun all day, the snow was quite crunchy. Also, it was quite cold at -24C. We ended up deciding to skip lunch to try to take advantage of what good conditions remained. We chowed down a cliff bar and after a brief pause at the edge of Cervinia headed back down the hill. While the snow conditions weren’t great, the skiing was still very fun and the terrain stunning. We crossed glaciers, frozen rivers, forests, abandoned stone buildings and an old aqueduct. The end of the run was a very long traverse that took us back to the last town in the Ayas valley, Saint Jacques, just above Champoluc. By this time, Dave’s legs were completely destroyed and quite tired from all the long days of skiing. Luckily we made it to the bottom of the hill unscathed. At the bottom, we walked over to the bar to grab a spritz to finish out the day. With the purchase of the spritz came a ride in the Fiat Panda back to the parking lot where we had left the car. All in all we skied 40 Km across two countries and three resorts. Pretty rad day!

Overall, heliskiing was amazing. If we had unlimited funds, it would definitely be our new preferred way to access ski terrain.

Today we had a fun, mellow day on piste with Jeff, Christine and Nate. It’s snowing pretty hard so visibility was low. Took it easy cruising around and then enjoyed a nice lunch. We love this place and it will be hard to leave.

Verbier

Above the clouds

By David on Thursday, February 8, 2018

Bonjour from Verbier!

We spent yesterday afternoon relaxing and walking around the town, it’s very different from Zermatt. Where Zermatt is down in a valley, Verbier is on the hill and more spread out with fancy chalets and hotels going up from the town center. It’s got a very different vibe too. The terrain reminds us a lot of Kirkwood or Deer Valley with a lot of fun off piste options and it’s steep too. We’ve seen many more skiers with alpine touring gear and even telemarkers than we did at Zermatt and the off piste areas seems more well tracked (although it hasn’t snowed since we got here so it might be looking like this in Zermatt too). So there’s a soul skier group. Then there are lots of well heeled Brits of all ages. In addition to the normal restaurants and apres bars that you’d expect in most resort towns there are also tons of nightclubs. Like DJ battle, EDM nightclubs.

Last night we had a lovely dinner at Aux Vieux Verbier recommended by one of Sara’s colleagues in LA (thanks Patrick!)

We also stumbled on a great wine store called Vinabagnes where we met some very nice locals who gave us recommendations on where to ski off piste and also let us taste the local wine from the Valais region of Switzerland. Wine is grown here on some pretty steep terrain, similar to what I’ve seen in Piemonte, and the earth is very minerally.

This morning we headed up the hill via the Medran gondola. Since we arrived there’s been an inversion with a very low cloud cover (this morning it was actually snowing in town) and clear blue skies at higher elevations. After the first gondola we took one more gondola and two trams, all the way to the top of the Mont Fort peak. Although we wanted to follow the alpine touring folks off the back we weren’t exactly sure how to make our way back to Verbier (one of the locals we met said it required an hour of skinning, the other said 20 minutes)and since we didn’t have skins and an hour hike seemed extreme we stuck to the front side. Still very fun and very beautiful.

We found a great place in the sun high above the clouds for Jake’s sticker. Thanks to everyone who helped me try to find a few more. A day before I left I found a few in a very random place at my house. I have no idea how they go there but once I found them I had enough for each stop on our trip.

After that we skied a bunch of different runs all over the mountain; they could use a good snow so a lot of crunchy bumps. We grabbed a late lunch of the hill (soup again cause Verbier is $$$$$) and then decided that we would take this long ‘yellow line*’ run down the valley and call it a day. Judging from the runs we had already done it looked like it would take us about 45 minutes to an hour. Perfect!

*A ‘yellow line’ is an off piste run that is marked in the center with neon yellow poles about every 20 ft. The skiable area is so massive off each lift that it’s easy to get lost, but more on that later.

Leaving lunch we followed a ridge line and topped into really fun stuff that took us down to a gate. Yea, the yellow line we planned to take down to the base was marked with a gate and a bunch of signage. Luckily it was open but still. We waited until we saw someone else go in and then we dropped in behind. The top of the run was fine, a little crunchy but still fun. We watched the skier in front of us disappear into a little gully, beyond the gully was a random cat track with really high walls on either side. Couldn’t see much of anything as we would our way down this cat track except that it looked really freaking steep on either side. Then we got to a giant sign that said a bunch of stuff in French and also don’t turn right, high avalanche danger. So we went forward a little bit and then visibility dropped a lot. We were in the clouds. Luckily two locals and a ski school instructor with a little kid came up behind us. The local guys went right and told us to follow them. The ski school dude and the little kid went straight. I’m not sure we made the right decision in hindsight because the local guys said the visibility was worse over there but we followed the ski school. We lost the ski school in the fog so stuck right to the poles, it was hard to see one past the other but we make a really good team and eventually got below the dense clouds and back onto the mountain run. After that we called it a day.

After skiing, we walked around town for a bit. We stopped by a local butcher and purchased some stinky cheese and bread to go with the wine we purchased yesterday for our hotel room apres-ski. We watched a bit of TV and waited for our next pizza adventure at dinner at La Pergola. I think all we are going to eat on this trip is melted cheese in some for. Tomorrow is our last day of skiing in Verbier and the. We are off to France on Saturday.

Zermatt

Zermatt- it’s a wrap!

By Dave and Sara on Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Our last day full day in Zermatt, here’s the recap.

Last night we walked around the town a bit, it really is so pretty here. There’s a lovely church where all the mountaineers of yesteryear are buried and right next door is the town hall and police station. And this!

Also the world’s largest Alphorn.

We grabbed drinks in a cool bar tucked inside the Old Zermatt restauarant and also ran into our ski guide David there. If anyone is thinking about coming to Zermatt we highly recommend booking a guide through David and his outfit Alpine Exposure. Super nice guy and he found us a powder stash. Yay!

After drinks we had pasta at Pizzeria Roma up the street. Super low key and friendly spot for a comfort food pasta dinner.

This morning we got up early, had breakfast and hit the mountain for our last day. Unfortunately there was weather around the Matterhorn so we weren’t able to go up to the glacier again but it was ok, there is PLENTY of skiing to be had even without the upper, upper mountain. We stuck to the western side of the valley, northern facing slopes which were protected from the storms that tend to come up and over from Italy. We skied the little cable car as everyone seems to refer to it, it’s a peak to peak relic that provides access to a ton of off piste skiing. So fun! Dave tried to make a gopro video but unfortunately just got great shots of his feet.

We also had some important business to attend to today. As many of you know, we put a sticker for Jake up at every resort we visit in Europe. (Sorry this photo is a little wonky but there was a patrol hut right next door and they were giving me the side eye.) Jake loved to ski and travel so we like to think we’re bringing him along with us on a bunch of fun adventures. We hope you enjoy the view of the Matterhorn, Jakey, miss you all the time.

After skiing the off piste area a few times we broke for lunch in Riffelberg. The snow train makes a stop here, I’m obsessed with this little train.

We ate lunch at the cafeteria again today, with the market tanking in the US and Switzerland being mad expensive we stuck with soup and water. But hey, at least it was soup with a view!

The weather got significantly worse after lunch so with our tired legs, we decided to ski just a little bit more and then make our way back down to the village, about 3000 vertical feet 🙂

We’ve been staying at the lovely Matterhorn Lodge and Apartments here in town. The staff; Ruth, Flo and Lea have all been so lovely and the room and lobby are both great. Tonight they surprised us with Apres in front of the fireplace. (…California, who dis?)

We will post about our dinner tonight tomorrow (hint: cheese of course). Tomorrow we are off to our next adventure in Verbier. This will be the last time we have to take our bags on the train. Wish us luck!

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