The Slow Road Through the Dolomites

The plan was simple and slightly ridiculous: one week, one mountain range, no fixed itinerary beyond a return flight. We rented a small car with a worrying number of kilometres on it and pointed it north.

The Dolomites do not ease you in. Within an hour the road was a series of switchbacks, each one opening onto a view that made us pull over again. We stopped so often that on the first day we covered about forty kilometres total.

In a village whose name we never quite learned, we ate lunch at a farm that served only what it grew. Dumplings, cured ham, a soft cheese that the owner described, through gestures, as "from the brown cows, not the others." We believed him completely.

The lesson of the slow road is that the destination stops mattering. By day four we had no idea where we would sleep that night, and it had stopped being a problem. It had become the point.