pizza – Energy and Time

Italy day 46: Como to Fontanella

October 4th: We started with breakfast in the pizzeria. It was still rainy but the view was great.

Our table for breakfast (and dinner the previous night). Lake Como in the background.

We couldn’t leave town without paying our respects at the temple to Allesandro Volta., founder of electrochemistry, inventor of the electric battery (“voltaic pile”), and discoverer of methane.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t go inside because it was closed for renovation. The museum houses some of Volta’s original devices.

Our next target was a gastronomic one: Salumificio Rossi, one of Italy’s top producers of prosciutto.

The retail store. Each of those hanging lumps is a prosciutto-cured ham.

The meat sampler for two included several prosciuttos and salamis.

Parmigiano Reggiano is also produced in this region. This is a sampler plate of different ages.

The cheese came with fig, apricot, and cherry jams. And Italian basil leaves.

Did I mention that they made prosciutto?

Then a lot of driving in the rain. Easy to blog because nothing much to say. We stopped for the night in Fontanella, and had dinner at a simple pizzeria.

Carol got a calzone; I ordered a smoked salmon pizza.

Austria days 34-35: Obertraun & Hallstadt

September 22nd: A long driving day. We stopped for lunch at a small roadside food stand that turned out to be surprisingly good, with many regional specialties.

I had a “bread soup”: beef-onion soup with chunks of bread and thinly-sliced crepe/pancake “noodles”.

Carol had a nice fried bratwurst that came with an intense mustard and grated horseradish.

We didn’t buy an Austrian toll-road pass, so we had to drive back roads that wound through a lot of scenic mountain passes. But the weather was a bit cloudy.

Eventually we arrived at our almost-lakeside hotel, the Seerose, in Obertraun.

The next-door Pizzeria Kegelbahn looked pretty good, so we had dinner there. It turned out to be excellent. I ordered soup and a cutlet, while Carol went for comfort-food lasagna. (Kegel is an Austrian form of bowling or skittles, so “Kegelbahn” could be translated as “bowling alley”; the restaurant has 2 lanes near the back.)

The garlic soup was creamy, intensely garlicky, and utterly delicious.

Turkey schnitzel with cranberry relish and parsley potatoes

Lasagne Bolognese, and yet another attempt to find a decent dark beer

September 23rd: We planned to see the Dachstein ice cave in the morning, but their cable car lift was out of order. They said it would be fixed in half an hour, but 2 hours later it was still not working. So, we wasted a couple of hours sitting around waiting for it, but eventually gave up, which was wise , because they never did get it running that day.

So instead, we went to the nearby Salzwelten (“salt worlds”) salt mine above Hallstadt. This is the oldest known salt mine on the planet, dating back about 7000 years.

It’s a long cable-railway ride up to the mine.

Looking down across the lake to Obertraun

For some reason, I don’t appear to have taken any still photos inside the mine. But Carol did.

About to enter, wearing my pink knit cap

Video of Carol and I descending the wooden slide

For dinner we went back to Pizzeria Kegelbahn. Why go searching for something else when you’ve got something this good right next door?

Carol opted for a Salzkammergut Pizza featuring local meats with corn, onions, and mushrooms.

I got the Hearty Lumberjacks Steak, “pork with roasted potatoes, onion, bacon, mushrooms”.

Croatia days 30-31: Zagreb

September 18th: Mostly a rest day. For lunch, we headed for a Curry Bowl restaurant only to find that it had apparently been abandoned years ago and its patio overgrown. (Online photos of the place showed tables where those bushes are now.)

So we went to a nearby sushi restaurant instead. The fish was very fresh.

Carol chose 3 rolls. Probably a better deal.

September 19th: Breakfast at the bakery by the bus station. I went (uncharacteristically) for pizza while Carol grabbed a slice of cheese pie.

Then we took an Uber up to the Gornji Grad (“Upper Town”) section of old Zagreb. And I do mean “up”.

It’s higher than the rooftops of most of the rest of the city, and has great views.

It’s such a steep drop that there’s a cog railway spanning it.

We wanted to see the Museum Of Naive Art, but it was closed. So we spent quite a while in the Museum Of Broken Relationships.

Then we just cruised around the neighborhood for a bit.

I thought I saw a tiny hummingbird in a flower bed, and spent several minutes trying to catch a photo of it. This blurry image is about the best I could do. But I now think that it was probably a hummingbird hawk-moth (Macroglossum stellatarum).

For lunch, we found where the Curry Bowl restaurant had moved to.

Carol had Hot Butter Calamari and I had the Black Pork Curry.

Croatia day 28: Zrmanja river

September 16th: We spent pretty much the whole day kayaking the Zrmanja river on a Raftrek tour. We had to lose a lot of altitude to get to the starting point, and drive some narrow roads.

The water was pretty low, so the rapids were mostly class I and II, but it was fairly easy to get stuck in spots.

Visoki Buk was the only waterfall we had to walk around. It’s about 4-5 meters.

Going over the final 3 meter waterfall. Sadly, only one person per kayak allowed.

One awkward thing about the trip was that they only had enough bus room to take the drivers back to the cars. The rest of us had to wait at the takeout point for an hour. But, there was a restaurant there. So I ate dinner, but Carol didn’t because she wasn’t there.

My ćevapi came with sliced bun, instead of on a bun.

Eventually Carol picked me up. Then back out the narrow roads, and uphill to Gračac. We ate dinner at the Kralj Zonomic restaurant again. Or rather, Carol had dinner and I had dessert.

Carol had a pizza, and I had crepes with syrup and whipped cream.

Croatia days 19-24: Vis

September 7th: In the morning we headed for the ferry out to the island of Vis.

The plan was to relax and unwind after two busy and physically hard weeks touring Iceland. But when we arrived, we had to drag more weight each than a Marine carries into combat, nearly a mile, slightly uphill, to reach our apartment.

The apartment was spacious and very white.

Vis is probably most famous in America as the filming site of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018). I’ll probably have to rewatch it now to see what locations I can recognize.

For dinner we went to Restoran Val on the waterfront. The catch of the day included monkfish, which I had first sampled as sushi in Iceland.

The catch-of-the day selection. The two flat brownish fish in the center with wide gaping mouths are monkfish. I chose the smaller one (underneath on the left).

Carol had wild boar stew with gnocchi; we shared a side of roasted vegetables.

Cooked monkfish was nearly as good as the sushi. If you get the chance to try it, you should.

September 8th: A lazy morning. We split a pizza for lunch.

anchovies, capers, zucchini, and cherry tomatoes

September 9th: Another ćevapi for lunch.

In the afternoon we had refresher scuba dives. I hadn’t dived in about 7 years. I didn’t take the GoPro because my instructor didn’t want me distracted, which was probably a good idea, but we did see two octopi that I can’t show you. 😦 On the way back we stopped at a boat bunker from the Tito era. Vis has a lot of military installations from the cold war.

September 10th: Sandwiches at Kavana Riva for lunch. (“kava” means coffee, “kavana” means cafe or coffee shop.)

I had a club sandwich, which came with a balsamic drizzle, and fresh-squeezed orange juice.

Then two scuba dives. Vis harbor is one of 4 places in the Mediterranean where you can legally dive to see amphorae from old Greek and Roman shipwrecks.

Diving is easy. Dragging all your gear to and from the dive is a pain in the butt.

I saw my first polychaete worm, probably a Bearded Fireworm (*Hermodice carunculata*).

Me, thinking up some bad pun about “jugs”.

Buoyancy control is hard, but I can “handle” it. 🙂

Perhaps a crackpot. A mishaps’ cracked pots. Can you tell the difference?

At dinner I tried a lemongrass-flavored sparkling mineral water, Römerquelle Emotion Limunska Trava, and really liked it. It became my go-to drink on hot days. Römerquelle is bottled in Austria, sold only in Europe, and part of the Coca Cola family.

The harbor in the evening.

September 11th: Our day to drive around the island (counterclockwise). We rented a tiny car that surprisingly had plenty of legroom on the passenger side.

First stop was the 2nd-largest town on the island, Komiža (population about 1400). We considered staying there.

The rest of the harbor isn’t too bad either.

A bit further around the island, and higher up in the hills, we found the entrance to the “Tito Cave”, where Yugoslav partizans hid out during WWII. It’s actually a series of different caves, with overlook posts guarding the approaches.

It looks innocent enough, but it’s 206 stairs up to the LOWEST cave.

The lowest cave isn’t very large, just one room. We didn’t continue on to the others.

Probably a Dalmatian Wall Lizard (*Podarcis melisellensis*). Maybe subtype *gigas* since that’s native to Vis.

Then we drove as high as we could get by car, without entering the restricted military base on top of the mountain.

From near the summit we could see most of the island. The south side (to the right) has good sun and is mostly agricultural, with many vineyards. There’s a large solar power installation.

We had lunch at Aerodrom Gostionica Wine House. I had a tuna-pasta salad, Carol went for the cheese sampler plate.

Then we went looking for the local nude beach. This sign clearly wasn’t for it; FKK = Freikörperkultur (“free body culture”), a prominent German naturism/nudism movement started in the 1800s, which has become shorthand for nudism across much of Europe despite the tendency to use English for everything else.

But we couldn’t see how else to proceed, so we ended up reaching the water in the wrong place, and had to hike over wet uneven rocks.

The actual nude beach was about as far beyond that point as the point is from the camera.

Once we found it, it was rocky with almost no shade, because it’s a south-facing beach and it was early afternoon. We saw a few other couples and singles around, some swimming, some just sunbathing. There was pretty good snorkeling, with some deep pockets just offshore.

On the way back, we tried going higher, and found a better route that included a small bunker.

Carol even hiked out nude until we got close to people.

In the evening we saw Shang-Chi in an outdoor theater. Half the movie was in Chinese with Croatian subtitles, which made it challenging.

September 12th: Carol went snorkeling in the morning while I rested and blogged.

This nice beach was walking distance from our apartment

Then it was time to pack up and drag our stuff back to the ferry. But we broke up the slog by having lunch at Bistro Frutarija.

The food is great, but they’re particularly renowned for their smoothies and fresh juices. I got the Avocado Toast, but here am finishing Carol’s Mango & Sea Bass Salad.

After that it was just travel. Hike to ferry, take ferry to Split, hike to bus terminal, take bus to Zadar, hike to our new apartment, eat something, and sleep.

Iceland day 3: Snæfellsnes peninsula

We ended up yesterday in Stykkishólmur because we had signed up for the “Viking Sushi” cruise. It started in the afternoon, so we had time for a leisurely breakfast at the local bakery.

Breakfast in Iceland often means a meat-and-cheese sandwich

And to catch a few sights in town.

the most modernist of the three churches

Then it was off. Our first stop was the famous Kirkjufellfoss (“Church mountain waterfall”). It was raining so we didn’t stay long.

Then off to Saxhóll, an old volcanic crater.

Then on to Djupalonssandur, a famous “black sand beach”. I don’t think Iceland understands what the word “sand” means, since this beach was entirely rounded pebbles. I got so intrigued by looking for natural Go stones that I forgot to take any pictures. But the rock only looks black when it’s wet; when dry it is darkish gray.