Day 13 - Coldrano (80 kms ) - " A whodunnit special" !

It was an Agatha Christie / Sherlock Holmes mystery all rolled into one ! I'd definitely washed my Orica Green Edge jersey and hung it in the closet but this morning despite triple checking everywhere, it could not be found.

The chief suspect, one Kevin Henley could recall putting some washed riding gear on our open 3rd floor verandah, but couldn't recall handling the OG jersey.

I'd considered torture to make the suspect "spill" but Wimbledon (H's pet hate) wasn't on till later in the day ! Id also considered some form of hypnotherapy transgression but thought that could bring up more issues than any reasonable human could deal with. With H adamant that the jacket could not have gone over the balcony I decided that my best bet was to look in the garden 3 floors below !

Sure enough as I wandered around the garden i spied my jersey hanging up on a hook in reception and momentarily had visions of doing the same to Henley !

With our delay over we hit the trail on another hot day and cycled surprisingly easily into and around Bolzano having only to do a minimal amount of city road riding before again picking up the lovely cycle trail that continued to follow the Adige river northwards.

With spectacular mountain scenery on our sides and in the background (still with smatterings of snow) we continued onwards at a small gradient until we hit Merano.

It was here our profiles showed an average 4% climb which started off actually as a 10% climb in the strong 33 c heat.

At one point I mentioned to Kev that the no 7 on the trail sign indicated 7kms of this type of climbing - Kev's response was to have an immediate cardiac arrest shortly after mine !

Thankfully i was wrong. The numbers in fact indicated the number of each switchback as we worked our way upwards to the ancient toll point of Zoll.

Here we breathed a sigh of relief as the the significant gradient (14% in parts) flattened giving us the energy in the heat to sit back and enjoy the marvelous mountain views

We were passed in the opposite direction by numerous groups of MTB riders suggesting that some good trails were nearby but i suspect that most had caught the train up simply so they could ride the extended free flowing down hill section !

After a coke at Naturs we finally finally at Coldrano at around 6.30 p m. In time for me to plunge into the hotel's pool while H did some relaxing !

Only 1 more day in Italy !