Stelvio Pass Bernini and Lake Como

Stelvio - Mighty Impressive but not the Transfaragasan 

Glacier at Stelvio

Originally our plan was to travel from Austria thru northern Italy do to the “Great Passes”, a motorcycling Mecca if you will. But Venice and friends got in the way of this, and we are glad we let them.


So now we are back to ride Passo del Stelvio, and Passo de Bernina. At 2730M Stelvio is a huge pass to take and with it being mid-summer there was more traffic than we would have liked. I have over an hour of video to see what you haven’t seen in person yet. It is staggering, the enormity of it, and yet Transfargarsan holds more appeal if only for the more mysterious location,  tunnels and construction techniques. The good part is that it is hot and sunny, usually people see it in the rain, or worse, snow. One fellow we talked to made 3 attempts before riding it successfully. Weather (rain), rock falls and weather(snow) were his earlier failures.


Suffice to say we thoroughly enjoyed going over it and welcome anyone to our house who wants to view video. I think about 1 1/2 hrs. for the whole thing but we will edit it to the really good parts. Probably the most interesting is the south down slope side where there are the tunnels that have almost 90 degree turns in the middle of them. You can really see that ( or not) in the video segment.

Onto Bernini and then St Moritz, a place that I came to at the end of winter in 1965, it is now a Banff of southern Switzerland. We were met at the Swiss border by guards who were intrigued by a Canadian (BC) plated M/C. Claims of it being the first they have ever seen. Onto St Moritz where the front lake is for sailing and the back lake is for Kite sailing. I have an excellent video segment on this as well.


We then stayed in a small Italian Alp village Chiavenna, at a place that Sandra had selected. It again is fantastic. We stayed here a couple of nights and visited Lake Como.

Over 100 counted

Lake Como



Lake Como is a very popular place in the summer and we decided we’d do a loop tour around it. It has charming and well known villages such as Mennagio where we stayed in 2006, and Varenna directly across the lake from Mennagio, and Bellagio, which has it’s namesake on a hotel in Las Vegas now.

Eye Candy in Varenna

Mennagio gelateria

We headed down the east side to Bellano and then onto Varenna a very picture perfect town. Here we found you could catch a ferry directly across to Mennagio which we did as well. Here are some pictures we took as we enjoyed the day.