Follow the Mountains : Italy - Day 11: A cold morning, people and nice views

Friday, May 20, 2022

Italy - Day 11: A cold morning, people and nice views

I started with a T-shirt and shirts this morning but was really cold for a few hours, since the trail went down and along a valley. But when the sun cam3 out and the sky was blue without a cloud, I got warm pretty quickly. I'm glad the trail often goes through forests, which is much cooler.

I visited the Grotte deĺo Scalandrone, which was quiet big, had stalagtits and stalagnites and a river.

I noticed that it's weekend! In the Parco Regionale dei Monte Picentini, there were lots of people working or having a picnic. And everybody wanted to talk to me in fast Italian... also the guy from the refugio that I had tried to avoid. But the guy was just walking down the trail with bis 2 dogs, looking for truffle. I tried to rush away, ended up on the wrong direction, so he even felt like he had to walk me a bit to the right junction and talk a lot of Italian to me. Really nice, but especially when I am in hiking-mode this is too much.

So I finally took the right trail up to Monte Terminio (1806 m) and had some nice views. the trail down was rather steep, switching between meadow and beech forest. With my shoes without profile, walking on all the beech leaves was rather skiing then hiking. But I made it down to a less steeper part, where I wanted to camp. Not ideal, despite my map saying it is all forest, the flat side of the ridge was grass with lots of rocks. After looking around for a while, getting slightly annoyed, I settled with a spot in the middle of the meadow in the sun. At least it is not going to rain and like that I will (hopefully) have a nice sunset ;)