14/7 - Trentino Alto Adige, or,  driving through the Dolomites

Being as how the Italian Autostrada are mighty expensive (and not much safer than the B roads...) I set the GPS to take us to Weer via aforementioned B roads.  This sometimes works well, sometimes not.  It did a good job in the Swiss Alps last time, when the road across the Italian-Swiss border closed following a landslide (not an eventuality I'd considered when planning the trip...) and we had to skirt murderously narrow roads through otherwise very quaint villages as it made neat work of getting us to Locarno.

Based on this experience, and in the belief that if things got too ...high for our (my) liking, we could always turn back and continue on the main roads, we set off.  I spent a lot of my teens and student years in this area, skiing, hiking, studying and generally enjoying the feeling of living in a foreign country.  It was here that it first dawned on me that I didn't want to live in England any more.  For reasons I couldn't explain I felt more at home there, and driving through all the tiny villages from Trento to Bolzano again, I think I felt homesick.

It's the earthy colour of the little houses clustered around the bell tower, the river that meanders slowly down the mountain side, the wooden bridge that connects the two sides of the village, the clear mountain air and the feeling of being somewhere not exactly home that seeped into my subconscious at an impressionable age, and left me with a barely perceptible longing  to always be somewhere else.