A whole long string o' buses

---

Geo: 46.3754, 11.6578

The plan for today: find the team buses (as this is a start town), and see who we can arrange for Gnorm to meet.
Thanks to the guide that the Giro puts out ("Garibaldi"😉, we knew roughly where the buses were meant to line up.
But we also knew that the team bus drivers -- or the guys who flag them to their parking spots -- don't always follow those guides. So we walked down the street to where the guide said the buses would be.
Man, that felt like a looong street.

When we got to a point where we could see down to the end of the road, we hung out, and waited for the buses to start arriving.
They did so, without making us wait too long. The nice thing was, we could see who was coming and tell where they were going to end up settling in.

Our target for the day was the Movistar team bus (nope, no "e" in there -- Movistar is a Spanish telecom company, I believe). Their lead rider is Nairo Quintana, who's a pretty great mountains guy. So when their team bus came down the road, we headed that way.
After waiting for half. An hour or more, some of the cyclists started coming out -- some to warm up on the trainers, some to just hop on the bikes and go sign in for the day. I had a great spot, right in front of Nairo's bike, so I was in a great spot to politely ask for a photo with Gnorm.

We're fans of one of his teammates, Rory Sutherland, so when he came out of the bus, we were happy to have him agree to a shot with Gnorm.

When Nairo finally did emerge, he went straight to the trainer, and didn't really interact with any of the fans, so I wasn't insulted that we didn't get a photo. Disappointed, but not insulted.

All the riders have to sign in by 5 (or is it 10?) minutes prior to the race start, and often have to make their way through crowds, filled with people who insist on stopping them for a selfie or an autograph. So when they all starting heading up toward the start, we backed off.

Wait - is that Joey Rosskopf, just hanging out isn't he gas station parking lot? Perhaps time for a photo? Thank you, off to work you go.

We had the idea that we might make it back to the hotel in time to watch the start of the race from our balcony, but alas, my unwillingness to run, paired with the short gap between sign-in and race start, meant that we missed it.

We'd spotted a giant TV set up in the plaza not far from the hotel, and I thought there might be a restaurant or bar there who could provide a bite to eat. We claimed 2 seats at an unusually tall table thingy, and I went up to the bar to stumble through ordering something (apparently "toast" in Italy is more than just heated bread -- it's an actual sandwich).

The broadcast was -- unsurprisingly -- in Italian, and since we'd recently paid* to be able to watch the broadcast in English, we opted to finish our lunch and pop back to the room to watch the rest with commentary that we could understand.

There were intermittent -- or rather, irritatingly frequent -- issues with the streaming, so in the end, we settled for watching it with Italian commentary. Sigh.

When a suitable amount of time had passed, so that we wouldn't be the equivalent of the old couple at Furr's Diner at 4:30 in the afternoon, we headed down to the hotel restaurant for dinner.
I was quite careful to NOT ask for anything involving apfel.

This was a pretty fancy-schmancy dinner (especially for us), with wine an' a candle an' everything. Being as how we were in an alpine region, we opted for a lovely gewurtztraminer, and the whole meal was reallyreally tasty.

*in past years, as we've been watching other bike races from France, we were able to stream the broadcast on our phones, through the DishTV app. This year, the Giro -- which has been on BeInSport in the past -- is not on BeInSport. (Note to self: modify the Dish subscription to remove that package.) Instead, it's been picked up by a company that does only online content, Fubo TV. We happily paid the subscription, so that we could get English commentary for the race we were watching in Italy.
Trouble is, once you're IN Italy, there are pesky little things with names like Licensing Rights and whatnot, that make the FuboTV app come and say "Sorry, you're in Italy, non watchio il televisio in il iPad" (or something more Italianly correct).
So we paid a little more, for an app that would make it look like we were in the US, so that the FuboTV app would let us watch the bike race with English commentary while we were in Italy.
Yes, it would just be easier to take a vacation where people did everything for us, it where would the fun be in that?

---

Photos

Joey Rosskopf seems....
...envious of Gnorm's bike?

Columbian fans enjoying some snow
The town brought in a little snow from a nearby peak, for.....um.....ambiance?