Giro d’Italia Tappa 6 – Cani Sciolti Valtellina and the Mäuerchen Pass

What happens when I join a group of riders from Valtellina which is famous for their fails? Together we do an epic fail!
Every fail begins with a plan, a plan where there is a little devil inside … The plan is simply to go together to München over Passo Muretto and then following river Inn through Switzerland and Austria. We have three days. Sounds easy.

I meet this group of splendid riders on the train to Sondrio: Ila, Cello aka Capitano, Pagha, Clava, Fisto and Guido.
So we start with Mäuerchen Pass, the german translation of what will become the solid impregnable white wall in the end. Here I have to state that I promised the Capitano not to say who had the idea to go over this pass to Switzerland. What happens at Mäuerchen Pass stays at Mäuerchen Pass. We start it the italian way (in my stubborn german germanity perspective) – cafe, cake, newspaper, technical fixes. We climb up the more and more winding road. In a small village we don’t forget to buy some cheese and bread and sweets for the way. A shopkeeper explains that it will be easy up there as there is no more snow and that we always have to stay on the left. Good omen, in fact we always have to go to the right. Then the tarmac road ends what is celebrated with a can of red wine. We have more or less push our bikes through the forest on an old military path. In the distance we can see the mountain ridge of Mäuerchen Pass. We are seven, and everyone in the group has his personal point where he is convinced that it will not work to go over the damn Mäuerchen. First is maybe Guido, still 2 km away. The last is the Capitano, he walks with his troops into the wall of snow. It is late in the afternoon when the whole group realizes that we won’t reach München in the available time and that we need a plan B, a plan that always works, where the little devil has to stay outside: plan B is a table full of pizzoccheri and a never ending row of sciatt in a special tavern in a special village outside of Sondrio. Just google it, I was not allowed to take pictures as it is a secret recipe from Valtellina.
We make a nightride home to Morbegno, on sunday morning I wake up by stereo snoring and have to leave without saying goodbye.

Thanks for the sleeping bag and sorry for not wrapping it up and thanks for the Torta Engadina, my only meal on the 14 hour train trip home, where I got pickpocketed (Fisto, my sun-glasses are now also gone) and where border police slammed a toilet door into me and where I had to hide my not allowed bike in the baggage rack over anxious japanese women in an overcrowded train. Going to München by bike is more easy, let’s try it again Cani!

Edit September 2015: finally a poetic, artistic, historic and even culinary review can be found at my friends of Caniscioltivaltellina