Drive to place suggested by Cliff and Nadine: Selva Wolkenstein, more commonly named Dantercepies after the walking trail (Selva is Ladin; Wolkenstein is German). It’s the highest village in the Val Gardena. Free parking right under the gondola lift and a path less traveled when we walk in blissfully cool, almost chilly atmosphere, encountering remarkably few other hikers.

When we get to the ticket booth, David instantly realizes he’s left his Gardena Pass in his other pants, but Cynthia sweet-talks the Ticketmaster into letting the dummy through by showing him her receipt for our passes on her phone. (What DID we do without phones?)

The “scenes” around today’s hike are quite different than previous hikes. The rocks here are more prominent, covered by fewer trees, so we feel the Dolomites more directly, if that makes sense.

Nonetheless, the views are still quite typical in places and we stop at Jimmi’s Hütte, a VERY fancy Refugio with upscale dining, for a drink before hiking back. The hut is protected from the mountains behind it by a massive inverted “V” whose point faves the mountains while its 15-foot high walls spread to both sides of the hut. The inside of the V is filled solid and the outsides of the V are boulders as large as trucks, creating valleys that sluice water and rocks from the mountains around the hut below.

We leave the fancy hut and hike back

Before heading back to Grones, we walk through Selva to see it and load up on limes and tonic. Cynthia has a horrible 20 minutes when she thinks she left her new, much loved sunglasses in the supermarket, to which we return and scour to no avail. Disconsolently returning to the car, we find her glass in the shopping bag beneath the two.four packs of Fever Tree.

Dinner, as you can tell from the photos, was just awful. … And to bed.