Switchbacks and Ragù
The Dolomites made the van work for it. The reward was pink mountains and a very dark bowl of pasta.
The van does not love a hairpin. Three and a half tonnes of home does not want to be flung up a mountainside one tight bend at a time, and it told me so, loudly, in second gear, all the way up.
Earning the altitude
I’d read about this road and decided we had to drive it, which is easy to decide from a flat car park the night before. In the moment it’s a different thing, engine roaring, a sheer drop off one side, a motorbike appearing round every bend like it’s personally affronted by your existence. The kettle came loose. A cupboard emptied itself. We crawled up and up until the trees gave out and the pale grey towers of rock just appeared, enormous, like the mountains had been waiting to see if we were serious.
We parked where we could see them properly and I sat on the step and didn’t say anything for a while.
Dinner with a view that doesn’t quit
Then it got cold, fast, the way it does up high, and what I wanted was something slow and dark and warming. No butcher for miles, but a roadside stall had fresh mushrooms the size of my hand, so they became a ragù that simmered while the rock outside went from grey to coral to pink and finally to nothing.
That’s the trade this life keeps offering. It makes you work, white-knuckle and second gear and a cupboard full of spilled pasta, and then it pays you in a sunset on a mountain and a bowl of something good eaten with all the windows steamed up. I keep accepting the trade. I think we’ll be up here a while yet.