Day 143 Lovere

We are finding it quite hard to believe that we are less than 50 Km from the end of this epic stroll. The map tells us that our route will be much shorter than that taken by cars. Looking at the contour lines on our map and the altitude numbers we can see why this might be.

After having listened to another free musical concert this evening we strolled out onto the lake promenade where we could see some people, dressed in yellow tee shirts, putting some rescue dogs through their paces at the water’s edge. The dogs were retrievers and were obviously enjoying fetching balls and plastic tubes which had been thrown into the lake. The game moved up a notch when one of the yellow tee shirted people jumped into the lake and flapped about in a helpless manner. This was looking very dramatic until the dog jumped into the lake as requested but noticed that its ball was still in the water. It did what we both expected that it would do, it fetched its ball and looked for a pat on the head. The chap in the water was obliged to swim ashore with a sheepish grin.

We have offloaded some of our stuff onto the postman today, so our packs will be about 5 Kgs lighter in total. We have sent on the electric kettle and Janet’s hot water bottle so it will be bed socks for Janet and no tea or coffee in bed for either of us for the last few days.

Tonight we are sitting in a bar trying to get the contact details of the rifugi for the last leg of the stroll. As I mentioned earlier, the ascents rise to over 2000 metres a few times so we need to break the thing into three or four sections.At the moment we have struck a blank but this has happened before so we shall persist until something turns up.