Tag Archives: lake

Day 13 – Acquapendente to Bolsena – long walk, varied conditions

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Monday 26 May 2025 – Well-organised as our B&B was, the breakfast fare that had been left in the kitchen area was not the sort of thing that we thought we could make into a decent breakfast – I mean, cornflakes? So we hatched a plan to get going early and have breakfast at a local bar. So we were out of the B&B before 0730 without even having had tea and on our way to Bolsena, today’s destination, with just a croissant and a cappuccino by way of fuel, by 0750. We were confident that there would be sustenance at a coffee stop half way along our 24km walk; we hoped that confidence would sustain us that far.

Passing one more piece of street art,

we bade farewell to Acquapendente

and set out in cool, sunny conditions. On the road, we passed a cereal factory

with, just behind it, episode two of the same cereal.

We then headed off the road on the dreaded strada biancha

but at least there were some shady patches along it. Looking back, we could still make out the tower that sits above Radicofani.

The landscape was markedly different from what we’d seen in Tuscany – entirely arable farming with some woodland, and none of the hilliness that we’d seen north of the border with Lazio.

As well as the various cereal and vegetable crops we noted as we walked along, it was clear that in Lazio they were also farming sunlight,

and hazel nuts.

Well, that Nutella doesn’t make itself, you know. Other crops included potatoes, which at one point stretched as far as the eye could see.

We were walking in the “Altopiano Vulsini”, a geologically and historically significant volcanic plateau in northern Lazio. This encompasses several volcanic complexes, including calderas at Montefiascone (which we visit tomorrow) and Bolsena (today), and is clearly a very good basis for arable farming.

We did see a single cypress which had somehow snuck over the border from Tuscany, though.

Where fields and meadows were not actively being farmed, there were lots of wild flowers

with poppies being delightfully ubiquitous.

The landscape was also sprinkled with artworks by Lorenzo Gallo, a Rome-born sculptor (who goes by the moniker Renzogallo),

“The Departure”
“The Meeting”
“The Direction”
“The Testimony”

accompanied by info boards with descriptions of unbearable pretentiousness. The first of these was on the ourtskirts of San Lorenzo Nuovo (I wonder about the synchrony between the names of the artist and the town). The town, though, was important, as it was the one and only place we would find somewhere to stop and have coffee. We stopped at the first available bar, apart from anything else because it said it offered a Timbro stamp for our credenziali. Inside the bar were a couple with three really cute long-haired chihuahuas, of which I totally failed to get a photo; but obligingly they came outside and actually encouraged a photo by handing Jane a couple of them.

Having consumed the coffee, we came across the town square shortly afterwards

with several bars around it, all offering timbri, so clearly the pilgrim market is something the town recognises. So we stopped for a second coffee and a sandwich

and then popped into the church on the town square.

There was some lovely artwork to be seen,

and we lit a candle for our recently-departed friend Martin, the late and sadly-missed husband of Caroline, who had been with us until Siena.

The most prominent feature of the Vulsini Volcanic District is the Bolsena Caldera, a 16-kilometer-wide depression formed approximately 300,000 years ago. This caldera is now occupied by Lake Bolsena, the largest volcanic lake in Europe. It is vast;

the eruption that caused that crater must have been a helluva bang!

I had fondly imagined that we would stroll along beside the lake to get to the town of Bolsena, but, as is so often the case, I was wrong; we headed off into woodland, on what looked like a nice shady path,

and, it has to be said, much of it was. There were occasional rocky bits

and some steep bits

but by and large it was a pleasant stroll which led downwards, overall and in tortuous manner.

On one of the Renzogallo “artworks” – a lump of basalt, actually – there was a lizard basking in the sunshine, so I did a bit of a photographic wossname, and took a photo first with my Sony and then using the portrait mode on my phone. Here are the two results.

Phone, background blur courtesy of software manipulation

Sony RX100-VII, background blur courtesy of the laws of physics

We passed an oak tree

planted in 2006 to mark 500 years since Pope Julius II. The info board was in Italian but this is no match for Google.  Here’s the story behind the tree. The Papal Bull stated

“…that he had given Canon Peter von Sertenstein the task of leading 200 Swiss soldiers to Rome with their captain Kaspar von Silenen “pro custodia palatii nostri”. After crossing the Alps, through Lombardy and Tuscany, von Silenen and the 150 recruits entered Rome from Porta del Popolo Blessed by the Pope in St. Peter’s Square, the guards began their service in the Apostolic Palace that same day. Thus was born the Pontifical Swiss Guard.”

We actually saw a few more cypresses which were clearly huddled together for security in this foreign environment,

and a single, lonely, wind turbine, making a defiant statement about sustainable energy production, which The Powers That Be are clearly ignoring.

I was amused by the crest of a hill in the distance.

We passed a quarry, though we know not what was being quarried.

and the road turned back into a dreaded strada biancha.

I don’t know which I dislike more – the white ones, which reflect the heat, or the dark ones, which radiate it back to you. Today wasn’t too bad, as there were some shady patches; I’m dreading tomorrow (see later).

We caught our first sight of the town of Bolsena through the trees,

and were soon into the old town, which has a castle

the church of San Salvatore (not open, unfortunately)

and several attractive corners around the streets.

There were signs to lots of appealing-looking eateries.

What was less appealing was that, having arrived at 3pm, we’d missed the lunchtime window. The nice, attractive bars along the main street in the old town were no longer serving, but Google came to our rescue and identified one which was still open, called Romeros.

It describes itself as a “Ristopub Birreria” and has pictures of food outside it – normally red flags – but its USP for us was that it was open and would serve us lunch.  We actually had a decent meal there, including lots of pasta (against the morrow, see later) so my sniffiness is entirely unjustified. In this case, anyway.

Walking off lunch en route to our accommodation, an Agriturismo establishment called “Le Vigne“, we took the opportunity to look a little around the town. There are some nice viewpoints, over the castle area,

the town’s rooftops, old and new,

and the city gate.

There is a Basilica

with some ceramic work (by Della Robbia?) over the door,

and a lovely calm interior,

but we didn’t go in to explore, since we were still in our hiking gear, and shorts are considered disrespectful. So we carried on to our accommodation, which was not far away but still managed to be considerably uphill.  It’s a handsome place

which offers a nice viewpoint over the town

and had a good large room for us to settle into so we could finally make ourselves a Nice Cup Of Tea.

I’ve made several references to tomorrow; our destination will be Montefiascone, where we will enjoy a rest day; but we have to get there first. Doing this involves getting out of the caldera; and since our journey today was basically downhill, tomorrow’s will be fundamentally uphill.

We’re not quite sure what the weather will be, but we’re hoping it will not be too hot and sunny, as 16 uphill kilometres without the benefit of a coffee stop is somewhat daunting. We will, of course, survive, but to find out in what condition, you’ll have to return to these pages to find out.

 

 

Jasper, Much Maligne’d

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Saturday 10 September 2022 – In declaring yesterday’s rest day to be the End of Part II of our grand odyssey, it turns out I was a bit previous; we still had a little bit of Rocky Mountain-style business (i.e. lakes, waterfalls, that kind of thing) to attend to. Also, since we had failed to visit Jasper, we thought we should at least go in and see what was the state of affairs there.

Accordingly, we set out towards Jasper. As we drove the short distance in, we saw something a little out of the ordinary:

a helicopter carrying a bucket. There was no smoke visible, but we guessed that this was attending to some wildfire business or other – see later. We also saw a temporary roadside sign on the highway which said “Power out In Jasper. Do Not Stop”, but we ignored that.

We went in to the town, wondering whether there was any power to any of the infrastructure. Having parked the car, we discovered that at least the parking meters had power – of course they bloody would – and spent a few minutes negotiating with one. It looked like we’d chosen the station car park.

There were plenty of cars parked in the car park, but the roads were very quiet for a Saturday morning.

Some of the shops seemed to have the lights on, so we popped in to one of them, a tourist gift-type shop, and pretended to look as if we were going to buy something in order to ask the shopkeeper for his assessment of the situation. He said that most businesses now had their own generators and were open, with the main exception being some hotels and restaurants, which had not re-opened; we made a mental note of this to update Brendan later.

Jasper is an attractive place;

the downtown has some nice buildings and some street art on display, too.

It did seem that many businesses were operational, but there was a variety of generator solutions on display and a pervasive hum

and not every business was open.

However, there were a few people about in the attractive downtown area.

Seeing the Tim Hortons, a Canadian coffee shop chain, we thought we’d try out the experience.

It’s a perfectly decent way of getting a coffee (and any manner of cake), but is workmanlike rather than classy. Whilst we were there, we did see evidence that there really was a town shuttle bus,

despite its non-appearance the previous day. Having reassured ourselves that Jasper was gradually getting back into the swing, we headed back to the car, past a streetcar that was handsome, but looked somewhere between faded and disused.

(We saw it in operation later in the day, so it’s not disused, at any rate.)

Right: onward to the last bit of Rocky Mountain stuff, then. There’s a road out of Jasper which leads past two lakes, Medicine Lake and Maligne Lake; both of which are fed by the Maligne River, which in turn feeds into the Athabasca River. Going along this road brings you first, though, to Maligne Canyon, which was therefore our first stop. As you drive the road towards it, there are signs off to “Sixth Bridge” and “Fifth Bridge”, and this starts to make sense once you see the trail map in the canyon car park,

although not much sense; it has to be said that this trail map is somewhat confusing. We saw a signpost to “Second Bridge”, so we thought we’d better start somewhere. We walked from Second Bridge to Fourth (which did need repainting, actually) and back, and then, because it would have taken too much time to go further, back up to First.

We covered a couple of miles, which was much more than I’d expected – I’d thought it would be something like the Mistaya Falls we’d seen on our Icefield Parkway drive. The idea was the same – a torturously twisted canyon carved out by a fast river – but this was much bigger. I’ve tried to condense the trail from start to Fourth Bridge in a video:

it’s an engaging hike, unsurprisingly quite popular.

Next up: Medicine Lake. As we approached, we passed an area which had clearly been affected by wildfires.

Medicine Lake has a viewpoint at its north end

and close examination of everything on the right bank from that viewpoint showed that it had been severely burnt and fairly recently, as there was little evidence of regrowth. Looking back up the lake from the other end

showed that there had been some fire damage to the other bank, too.

We pressed on to Maligne lake, and it became clear that things were, erm, not clear; the visibility was very poor, and we assume that this is because of smoke from the fire that has affected Jasper so badly.

When visibility is good, Maligne Lake looks to be a wonderful place to visit – see my brother Chris’s blog post that includes their visit here – but there was nothing really to see here, and time was beginning to press, so we headed back to the main road that would take us to Edmonton, our next stop. We spotted the same bald eagle’s nest that Chris had

and also some roadside wildlife in the form of bighorn sheep which were wandering about, eating some of the scenery.

That really did conclude the Rocky Mountain section of our holiday. As we motored on towards Edmonton, the scenery changed. Interestingly, though, there was still the danger of wildfires and smoke – signs by the roadside warned of the possibility; and we even saw a wildfire in progress in the distance

and the knock-on effects of the smoke.

Soon, though, the scenery flattened out and we just motored on relatively flat roads towards Edmonton. The main interest in the drive for me was my gaming the Lane Assist function available on our rental car so that it didn’t realise I only had two fingers on the steering wheel, and trying to move into the overtaking lane before the adaptive cruise control slowed us down. I know how to have fun at the wheel of a car.

There were a couple of possible digressions on the route, but we ended up diverting only to one of them, the intriguingly-named “Beaver Boardwalk” in Hinton. It actually does what it says on the tin; there’s boardwalk and it leads past the evidence of beavers, erm, beavering: a dam;

and a lodge (we think).

The place is quite a nice diversion

but it seems that it needs some TLC – some of the boardwalks were closed, and others needed some attention. It borders on other terrain in the Maxwell Lake area, and this is obviously a place where people can walk and bike around, and where there is significant wildlife. I found it amusing that somewhere that tells you what to do when attacked by a cougar

or a bear

could, erm, bear this name:

So, refuelling aside, our next stop was to be Edmonton. We were a bit disconcerted to see this sign

as we thought we’d left Jasper far behind.*

In Edmonton, we encountered a slight issue that one doesn’t come across so much whilst driving in the UK these days.

Despite these slight visibility problems, and with help from the satnav, we found our hotel, the impressive edifice that is the Fairmont Macdonald (pictures tomorrow). It was past 7pm by this stage and so we forsook any actual unpacking or such domestic admin to head straight down to the restaurant which featured a patio. This was lovely.

We were expertly served by Tyler, who was clearly a seasoned campaigner (emphasis on the “camp”, but assured, courteous and expert), after which we tried for some after-dark photos in the hotel’s garden.

— GEEKY PHOTO ALERT —

The hotel has a nice view over a suspension bridge which is illuminated. There was a low, full moon of a beautifully muted hue, which I tried to capture on both my mobile phone and my Big Camera. The difference between the two is striking:

The top was my mobile phone, the bottom the Nikon. The mobile phone photo is a nicer scene, although it’s much noisier; but unless you need a technically high quality image, the mobile won this round.

— END OF GEEKY BIT —

That was it for the day. We have nothing planned for the morrow, so wandering about will be the order of the day. Come back and see what we found, won’t you?

* English comedian reference. Sorry.

All a-bored!

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Friday 12 August 2022 – We’re now aboard Silver Muse and underway. This is the view from our cabin’s balcony right now (it has been like that ever since we left Seward); appropriately we are in Disenchantment Bay.  (It improves – keep reading.)

We’re not missing anything right now, therefore this  is a fantastic opportunity to bring you up to date with how everything went yesterday.

This being a holiday, we were up earlier than would normally be the case at home. OK, the jetlag helped. Thing is, we needed to hand our luggage over to the nice Silversea people, conveniently located at a desk in the hotel lobby, between 8am and 9am, which means 8am ‘coz we always want to give ourselves maximum contingency for cock-ups. As well as handing over the suitcases, we had to prove that we were free of the Dreaded Lurgy and that we had ‘fessed up to the Canadian authorities about our imminent arrival in a week’s time. Jane, as always, had done a mistressful job of marshalling the necessary paperwork, which left the Silversea folks almost as impressed as I was.

It was our lot to travel by rail down to Seward, where the boat would leave. We actually had no particular idea about whether this was better or worse as an option than traveling by coach, but, whatever, we had to be ready to be picked up at 1215.  This gave me the opportunity to finish writing about our day in Anchorage on Wednesday, which had been sufficiently eventful that it took two days to write it up.

The rail trip to Seward starts, somewhat counterintuitively, from the airport. There are no scheduled trains from Anchorage to Seward, so this was a Silversea Special and it departed from the rail depot at the airport (presumably needed because of the massive logistical significance of Anchorage as a hub). A coach took us to the airport, where we joined a queue to prove, once again, that we had the paperwork, then another queue to get a boarding pass for the train and our cabin keys. There was a holding pen whilst we waited to board the train

and then we were called by carriage number.  They called carriage 555 first, and we were carriage 554, so held ourselves in readiness to sprint forward. Then they called….carriage 553. No matter, they hadn’t forgotten us and we were next to take the walk down the platform.

The carriage had big observation windows

and for the journey we had the pleasure of the company of the two ladies bottom right, Rebecca and her mother Margaret. Notice that there’s nowhere to put bags, so my super-heavyweight backpack had to be stashed somewhere else.

The carriage was run by a chap called Christian, who did the best he could to gee everyone up with tales of possible sightings of moose and eagles and bears and that, but his news that the train trip was going to take four and a half “ish” hours came as a bit of a surprise. The weather conditions also quite literally dampened expectations of fabulous and interesting views.

Christian started serving people from the far end of the carriage and it became clear that it would take him some time to work his way up to our end.  Happily, we discovered that we were next to the buffet car, which was rather like any British Rail buffet car except the lady serving behind the counter knew how to mix cocktails.  We satisfied ourselves with a hat trick of G&Ts before we were able to get a salad via Christian’s service, and that nicely lubricated the conversation with Rebecca and Margaret as we ground our way slowly along.

The most interesting challenge, photographically, was seeking a gap among the trees in order to get a photo.  The train might have been moving slowly, but the gaps between the trees seemed to flash right by.  I managed one glacier

and one lake

and that was about it (no moose or eagles or bears), which meant that by the time we got to Seward we were beginning to feel rather bored with the whole process. I don’t know whether the coach option might have been swifter, but we were all glad to get to Seward, where the weather conditions (as forecast)

weren’t all that conducive to any further beautiful photography.  Scurrying from the train to the boat was actually a higher priority

and, naïve soul that I am, I was surprised at the size of the ship.

The boarding process was very smooth and it was soon clear that we were going to be very well looked after during our cruise.  Every cabin has a butler; ours is called Francis and he came and introduced himself and talked us through some of the information we’d need throughout our cruise.  We also found the launderette, which is a nice thing to have the use of. These things are important, you know.

The rest of the day was taken up with the inevitable and important safety briefing and dinner, which we took in a restaurant called Atlantide.

Great food, nice surroundings and efficient and courteous service. After dinner, we thought it would be good to stretch our legs, so we walked around the ship to orientate ourselves.  It’s a big ship in our experience, but quite small in the general cruising context – a maximum of 596 guests if full. Relatively small as it is, it’s still an 11-story building  so there was a lot to take in.

We learned from one steward (Simon, German) that there are 437 guests on this cruise and somewhere around 360 crew, so the service level is near one-to-one; also that even if the numbers had been higher post-pandemic, the ship would not have been full, as they have to reserve some cabins for quarantine purposes. The pandemic’s consequences continue to affect the hospitality industry, even after all this time.

The strains of the day began to tell, and even the prospect of further free booze wasn’t enough to keep us going, so we called it a day at this point and got our heads down in order to prepare for a day at sea containing the prospect of seeing the Hubbard Glacier at reasonably close range from the ship. We therefore hoped for decent weather, not something that we’d seen thus far.  However…..

….the skies have cleared, making today’s activity a bit more promising.  I’ll write about that in the next post, so do come back and find out more, won’t you?