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Published: June 14th 2016
A bit of a change this morning for us as the closeness of the apartment to the eastern hillside seems to have made it later for the sun to really light up the day.
A decision to be made over breakfast as we look out to the mountain that could be the challenge for the day or do we satisfy our hiking desire by making it just as far as the lake below the mountain?
The sun made a brief appearance before it clouded over again but at least this will make hiking a little easier especially if there are sections that are over open farmland. We don’t know a lot about what is ahead of us as the map we have is not too descriptive.
There was some time for administration including washing clothes and then a late morning departure equipped with a backpack including some fruit and chocolate for lunch as well as rain jackets just in case it should rain.
Gretchen had used her mobile phone to get an outline of the trail to the lake which we decided would be far enough for us considering it will still amount to about 10 to
12km for the return hike.
Today’s walk started a bit different to those in the Dolomites as the first kilometre was all downhill!
However we knew the downhill couldn’t last long and after we entered the forest it was all uphill to the lake.
The trail was on a forestry road which made walking easier than some of the trails we hiked on in the Dolomites. That is until we reached a small clearing where there was a stack of recently cut down trees and it was about to be joined by another three trunks being hauled by a small tractor coming out of the next stand of forest ahead of us.
We let it pass by and continued on the trail which now was showing the effects of what happens when tree trunks are hauled along them by a machine with large tyres rolling over ground made wet by recent rain.
Thankfully the trail was just a steady climb and was well marked when a forestry road ran off in another direction. However we had to pick our way to avoid the mud created by the tractor with the logs being hauled, at times.
The songs of the birds in the trees that continued all the time we were in the forest was just lovely and made even more so by the tinkling of the small stream as it went over stones and small waterfalls that ran next to the trail. All in all it was quite different to the hikes in the Dolomites.
Then we came to a point where the direction arrows pointed up a track that was similar to the rocky stream bed we had encountered on the day we walked to the church in the Dolomites and Gretchen wasn’t keen taking that on considering that the forestry trail we had been on since entering the forest carried on around a corner.
After investigating where the forestry road went we decided we should keep to the marked trail and started the climb up the rocky stream bed and were pleased when that only lasted for about 50 metres before it became a forestry track again. And we thought it was actually the trail we had been on and had investigated but rejected continuing on it. Still it pays to follows the directional signs in unfamiliar territory especially as
we realised that we hadn’t told our hosts at the apartment that we were going hiking in the forest today just in case we didn’t return!
The mobile phone proved its worth as the signage didn’t have information on them to tell you how long is was to our destination of the lake. And of course it too was picking up the forestry trail too.
We must be a lot fitter than when we started out and although the hike through the forest hadn’t been too steep we had still walked about 4 km over some rough ground and yet when we reached the lake we even gave some thought of continuing on to the mountain top which didn’t seem that far away above the lake.
We were a bit surprised to find a cafe at the lakes edge and as we were sitting having our fruit and chocolate a local ‘tourist train’ with about a half dozen people on board arrived. For a couple of hours we had been ‘the only people in the world’! We had known that there was a road to the lake but that was no fun when there was a forestry
track to hike instead.
Spots of rain started to fall as we stopped to eat the fruit and chocolate but we found a place to sit with a view of the lake and we were joined by a mother duck and her seven ducklings looking for anything we might have had to feed them. They missed out from us as we didn’t think bananas and oranges were in their diet as wasn’t chocolate.
Despite the light rain falling we walked the trail around the small lake enjoying the different views and the forest birds that really hadn’t stopped singing around us since we started the trail up to the lake.
Gretchen had thought that her mobile phone had shown a different route back than the one we had taken to get here but we couldn’t find anywhere it might have started from. So we decided to take the road back which we knew from signs we had seen when we entered the forest that it was going to be another 4km ahead of us albeit on a downhill, sealed road.
It was still quite like walking through the forest as there was abundance of trees and
with birds singing on both sides of the road.
The main difference was that a couple of cars passed us in both directions and three couples at various intervals who were walking up to the lake wanted to know how much farther it was to go. They were clearly not as fit as us and weren’t even taking on the forestry track!
By the time we reached the road up to home we reckoned we had walked somewhere between 10 and 12 kilometres and our legs could have taken more if there wasn’t a cold beer waiting in the fridge for us.
Gretchen was updating her tablet which worked well and then she took on her Samsung Mobile Phone to do the same thing. She hadn’t completed any upgrades since she got the phone last August and this might have been the factor to tip the phone over the edge and make like it had crashed as the updates didn’t complete fully!
While I headed off to bed after 11pm she was trying to revive the phone and eventually gave up after midnight. We have relied upon the phone to find apartments on some occasions
and of course it has also been invaluable using mobile data when we have been on trails in forests.Tomorrow,or rather later this morning will be soon enough to try and bring it back to life.
PS: enjoy the title song on Youtube and imagine the tinkling of the piano as water over stones in the forest as you join us on our hike to the lake
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