Day 1 - the most amazing mountain passes

Today we enjoyed after a nice run and yoga an excellent breakfast at the hotel.. knowing that this would be our last opportunity of a lazy morning start. The Rally lineup started at 9am and 215 amazing teams participated. As usual, firetrucks, sportive cars, and very old models want to participate. A lot of first time rally drivers thinking that this is an easy ride… We also met a few crews who did last years rally with us, it shows a community!

The start itself took a while. We had a front row parking spot to see them all leaving and the rally spokes person, called Maschine, gave us a nice public announcement that we are good drivers that also won’t say no to a nice evening drink!

Knowing the miles ahead of us, we used the official rule to allow highways on day 1.. it allowed us to get the first mountain pass in reasonable time. The Timmelsjoch connects the Oetztal valley in Tyrol, Austria with the Passeier Valley in Italy. The pass is sometimes called the "secret passage" because it is little-used compared to the much easier and lower Brenner Pass some 16miles to its east. They charged us 17Euro’s to take the pass.. unbelievable.. but the roads were really good and it was a nice climb up, terrific views on the top, a tiny museum, a tree of wishes and dreams, and then.. down we went!

We took the luxery of a 20 min stop for coffee and ice cream in Italy..

And then it all started, the Stelvio pass… between Stilfs (or Stelvio in Italian) and Bormio in the province of Sondrio. The original road was built in 1820-1825 by the Austiran Empire to connect Lombardy with the rest of Austria, rougly a 2000m climb. We found out it takes 49 turns to get up, and turns where you need to drive carefully to make it.. almost an hour for 11 km, and our ‘Bullie’ just climbed it up nicely.. in parallel we followed the Whatsapp chat, seeing that many of the rally cars were still a few hours away to even get there.. We were quite relieved that we made it up in daylight, w/o rain and snow that passed through just before we went up. The mission of the day was also to find snow, taking a picture with us bare feet, with water from Germany, pine cones from Austria and a stone from Italy in our hands.. bloody cold! The pass is the 2nd highest European mountain pass.. the highest one has 7m more in height.. certainly nothing we drove ever before and likely nothing we will be driving again. The fellow rally drivers with their Porsche cabriolets overtook us.. but we were right with them .. smile!

A much easier road down on the other side to Bormio, were we finally arrived 7:30pm .. just finding out that all restaurants are booked.. took some phoning around to get to a nice Italian steak house and an excellent meal. We followed the technical 'Whatsapp' Chat for all rally participants.. an amazing amount of cars starting the tour up the Stelvio pass after 7:30pm .. many even later and not making it up to the top.. broken engines, breaks, and many other issues.. a lot of pleas for help.. one car even tried to tow another one up to the top.. giving up after 2 swift-backs.. knowing that there are 47 more to come.

Now it is 11:30pm.. the blog almost done.. and time to sleep!