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One of Evy's cousin's, Lorenzo (a police officer), picked us up this morning to take us on a tour for the day. We later found out that the poor guy had just come off an all night shift when he met us so he must have been exhausted. Despite this, Lorenzo was talkative and animated and was able to tell us a huge amount about the places and things that we were seeing on the way.
Heading North on the toll highway, we passed though a series of tunnels as we climbed through the mountains, eventually seeing snow off to the side of the road. Near Italy's Northern border, we pass through the ski town of Tarvisio. The lifts had stopped running, but we got a good view of the huge Olympic ski jump near the bottom of one of the hills.
After crossing the border into Austria, we reached the town of Villach. As Austria is also part of the EU, there is no gate at the border (again to Joshua's disappointment) but the change in language on the signs pointing to things like the Autobahn brought home the fact that we were now in a different country.
Our first stop after the border was the town of Velden. Despite the short distance from Italy, the architecture looks distinctly different here. The setting of the town, beside a lake and with the mountains surrounding it, makes it a very popular summer destination and the waterfront is lined with cafes and restaurants. Joshua played for a bit on a coin operated backhoe, before we headed down to the water front where ducks and swans eagerly greeted us, hoping for a hand out. We followed the edge of the lake around for a bit before heading back to the car.
For lunch we opted for a mall food court in the town of Villach, sampling some of the local beer before before making a trip to the supermarket. In Italy, the impressive addition to the supermarket was the huge pasta section - here it is the massive choice in sausages, with fridge after fridge devoted to the myriad of choices. The beer isles were equally impressive and we picked a case up for us and another one for the farm.
Back in Italy, we passed the town of Ugovizza which suffered a huge loss of life in
a 2005 mudslide. The huge piles of skree and rock that still line the gullies are a testament to the scale of this event.
We passed for a second time though the town of Tarvisio before following the narrow roads up into the mountains to the lake district Fusine. There has been an enormous amount of snow this winter here, and there was still at least a meter and a half left in the woods and along the edge of the road. Benjamin and Joshua enjoyed a quick snow ball fight (the first for us this winter) as we walked through the deep snow to shores of the higher of the two lakes. Next we drove back down to a smaller, lower lake and took a brief walk beside the river there before visiting this second lake.
On our way back through Tarvisio, we stopped by the ski resort to see if we could take the gondola up the mountain. Unfortunately, the summer gondola service is not yet open for the season as skiing has just ended. Instead we stopped by a local brew pub for a beer near the town of Santo Stefano.
Our next stop
was the town of Bordano. Like certain areas of Mexico, Bordana has mountains nearby where butterflies congregate every year to breed. The town has used this connection to promote tourism and has build a butterfly conservatory. To further promote this connection, many of the houses and buildings have very elaborate murals depicting butterflies. We stopped and took some photos here before continuing our tour down to the picturesque lake Cavazzo that is a short distance from the town.
On our way back home, we stopped at at the base of some large cliff near a eagle sanctuary. We followed a path for a short distance to a stunningly beautiful set of brilliant blue pools, crystal clear as there are fed from underground streams from the mountains—Lake Cornino.
Lorenzo was on a roll and we think we saw all of Friuli that day. He then took us to Mont Muris where we looked down over the region, we saw the Lake of San Daniele and our last stop was to drive by the house of the famous boxer Primo Carnera.
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