Merano is a 30 minute drive from Bolzano.  It is a little higher up in the mountains but has one of the most beautiful gardens at Trauttmansdorff Castle.  It is no surprise that I could spend a lot of time walking around the gardens.  It is recommended that you spend 2 to 6 hours there.  One of the nicest things about traveling to this region is there aren’t many tourists besides tourists from the area or an adjacent country.  Even though we are in Italy, German is the common language here.  Everyone speaks German and Italian so we have gotten by using German.

Here is a short video of our day in Merano:

And here are a couple of my favorite pictures 😉

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After walking around Bolzano in the morning, we headed to Caldaro which is about 30 minutes from the city.  One of my German friends offered to drive down and have lunch with us.  I let him pick the restaurant since he is more familiar with the region than me.  We have heard of Caldaro because it is on the wine route but I would have never found this restaurant without someone telling me where it was.  My friend was driving 4 hours to meet us so we wanted to make sure we were early.  We parked in the lot, which at the time was half full.  Within the next 30 minutes, the lot was completely full.

The region is full of beautiful vineyards and amazing houses.  It makes the Oregon wine region look very small compared to the rolling vineyards here.  We had a nice lunch on a patio where we got to spend time catching up.  The lunch portion was so large that I’m pretty sure every plate had the equivalent of a full box of pasta on it.  I don’t think I even was able to finish half of my plate.  Since he had another 4 hour drive back, the visit was not long enough but it was very nice to visit even if it was a short time.

After we left there, we headed down to the lake.  It is supposed to be one of the warmest lakes in the Alps.  The parking lot was packed and we were lucky to see someone leaving as we came up the aisle.  The only thing we couldn’t figure out was if we needed to pay or not.  We are pretty sure the sign said something about being a customer, so we paid an entrance fee to one of the restaurants that had a view of the lake.  Our car was still there when we got back, so it must have been OK.  I did put my feet in the water and it wasn’t too cold.  It was a very nice relaxing Sunday.

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Yesterday, we spent the morning walking around the city so I could take pictures.  The city is fairly small and very walkable.  We started by going to the museum to see Ötzi, which was very fascinating.  Ötzi is the nickname they gave to a caveman that they found in the early 1990’s up in the Alps.  He was so well preserved from the ice that they can determine what most likely killed him and what his last meals might have been.  He is estimated to live between 3359 BCE and 3105 BCE.  After viewing the body, you can also see the clothes that they found on him as well as some of his tools.  After the museum, we just strolled around the city taking pictures.

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One of the reasons we picked Bolzano as a place to stay is that you can do so many different type of things without getting the car out.  One of the first things we decided to do was take a funicular up one of the mountains.  From there we took a train to the end of the line.  The total journey was about 45 minutes.  Once we got off, we were able to walk and see the Earth Pyramids.  It was a small patch of rock formations on top of clay that has been eroding.

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It was a pretty easy walk and nice weather so we decided to keep walking on the trail.  Little did we know that at noon every Saturday, they sound emergency alarms in the mountains in this area.  We about jumped off the mountain it scared us so much.  We thought it meant there was thunder and lightning so we were trying to figure out where we would get shelter.  We later learned that they do this every Saturday as practice.  They use the alarms to alert of fires.  Gave us a good laugh once we were back and safe.