Bolzano

I wanted to share a few pictures of our trip to Bolzano yesterday! I went with my friend Stacy, who was a great tour guide - she and her husband lived there last year and then were very close by for two years before that, so she showed us the city in a completely different light. I'm a Bolzano convert now - I have to say that every time I visited the city last year, I was glad that we didn't live there full time, but yesterday, I didn't want to leave!

After doing a few errands (Bolzano is a much bigger city than Cortina with much lower prices) Stacy took us for a drive on the Strada del Vino, which winds through the vineyards of the Sudtirol/Alto Adige region. It was warm and sunny and breathtakingly beautiful. We stopped in the most charming towns along the road - Caldaro, Appiano and San Paolo, which is where Stacy lived last year. Everyone was out in the town square sunning themselves and drinking wine or fresh apple juice.

We found a winery and bought Lagrein, which is native to that region - and we tasted some grapes right off the vine!

There were also tons of apple orchards along the road, so we stopped at a little farm stand to buy huge bags of apples, grapes and homemade wine from a man named Georg. It was funny - we couldn't figure out which language he spoke! We tried both German and Italian and he didn't seem to understand either....but he was happy just to pick out wines for us without speaking.

Stacy's friend from home, who was also with us, had just been traveling in India for a month and she made a comment that in India, you feel as though the world is ending and there are so many problems in life, but then you go to the Alto Adige, and all is right and beautiful in the world again. She definitely had that right yesterday!