01/27/2026
Denver, Colorado to Ortisei, Italy - Day 1ish
I’m home from a trip to ski the Italian Dolomites, and this is post #1 of a daily recap of the trip as seen through my camera! After spending a few days slowly adjusting our sleep schedules to Italy time, we set out on an Airbus A350-900 serving Lufthansa flight LH481 direct from Denver to Munich. The 5,212 mile flight started with a fantastic sunset over the front range of the Rocky Mountains. The plan was to sleep through the entire flight, but I spent a good hour and a half glued to the window watching the northern lights slowly fold themselves through time and space as we flew past the southern tip of Greenland. Nighttime was accelerated due to our eastward travel, and before we knew it the sun was rising over a snowy Germany.
We grabbed our bags, got our passports stamped, and took our first train on a 45-minute ride to München Hauptbahnhof. We bought pastries and pretzel sandwiches for the four-hour train ride through Austria to Bolzano, Italy. Of course, our careful plans to sleep through the plane ride didn’t exactly pan out, and our lack of sleep began to show as our travel “day” passed the 24-hour mark. We fought sleep as the afternoon lengthened, and decided to play the card game Hearts to keep our minds and bodies engaged. We were so exhausted and slaphappy that every little thing made us laugh—especially almost shooting the moon a few times despite needing rule refreshers every hand (none of our brains were operating at peak performance). Once we made it to Bolzano, we figured out the local bus option to scoot us the remaining hour into the heart of Val Gardena.
We had heard that the bus drivers serving this route were impatient, so and boarded the bus like swashbuckling pirates and secured the elevated rear section of the bus while , and I loaded our luggage into the bus’ underbelly without really knowing if we had permission to do so. Our bus slithered up the twisty mountain roads and we finally made it to the mountain town of Ortisei, where we were rocked to sleep with the lingering cochlear memories of the day’s planes and trains and buses.
