Monday, June 30, 2014

Bard to Ivrea   June 29

                                                                              Current Day.                      Trip to Date

Distance walked - miles                                            8.5.                                   624.0

Gross climb- feet.                                                     640.                                 52,954

Song of the Day: Birthday by the Beatles

They say it's your birthday

We're gonna have a good time

I'm glad it's your birthday

Happy birthday to you

First, a big Happy Birthday to Linda! I'm sure she didn't anticipate celebrating her birthday on day 47 of a 650 mile across Switzerland and Italy!  More later about how we celebrated.

When we woke up this morning, it was raining.   We went to breakfast (possibly the best breakfast on the trip- ham, eggs, etc).  An hour later it was still raining.  We had decided that of it was raining today, we were not going to walk (who wants to walk in the rain on their birthday?!).  We waited around for another 45 minutes, and it stopped raining. So, we took off toward Ivrea, our destination.  After about 75 minutes of walking, it began to rain again, with a stiff wind.  Fortunately, we were fairly close to a train station and were able to catch a train to Ivrea.  The Italian train system is quite good.

A couple of shots from the walk today.  First is a train going through a tunnel.  No big deal with that except the tunnel is underneath the Fort that we toured yesterday.  


The walk south of Bard included an ancient Roman road.  Here is Linda in front of an arch on the road.


We then arrived at our destination in Ivrea.  Ivrea is a town of about 25,000 people that looks like it has seen better days.  Ivrea was the Corp headquarters for Olivetti, the typewriter company.  However, in the early 90's, Olivetti fell on hard times, due to competitors such as HP and others and significantly downsized.  Today, there is only a skeleton crew at Olivetti.  It sounds very similar to the issues that Rochester, NY faced due to Kodak.  

Our hotel for today  is another designer boutique hotel called Spazio Bianco.  Literally translated, this is "white space" or blank slate.  The hotel features art showings from local artists, that are made available for sale to the guests.  They had some very nice art.  Our room was spectacular, with windows on 3 sides of the room.   This past week, we have stayed in some of the best hotels of this trip, and definitely on a class with the best we have stayed anywhere.   

I had arranged with Brunella, the proprietor of the hotel to have a cake and bottle of wine available in the room for Linda's birthday.  She did a terrific job, and included a special Nebbiola reserve wine from the local region:


We later went out for a lunch of Pizza and Lasagne (what's not to like about that?!).  It was still raining hard at that point.   Later, the sun came out, and we were able to visit the Duomo and other points of interest.  In the evening, we went out for a lite dinner and enjoyed watching all the locals go by.  All in all, a fun day.  Happy Birthday Linda!



2 comments:

  1. Happy Birthday Linda!! and Mike, what a guy! Love the blog

    ReplyDelete
  2. Happy Birthday Linda ! :) and thank you for interesting blogging.

    ReplyDelete