Close encounter with an Italian bee!
The second toe on my left foot itches a lot. A few days ago, it was quite painful. Why? Because a bee flew into my sandal after we ate lunch in a tiny little town. It got stuck there and stung me.
Prior to the bee sting, Wednesday was a fine day. We decided to drive around some more, in an effort to stay away from other people and see the different areas around the Sud Tyrol. This is also a great opportunity for us to talk about deep subjects and listen to music, not that we don’t do that anyway.
I was thinking we’d go to Bolzano on Wednesday, but instead, we did a big loop in wine country. Unfortunately, we didn’t stop to buy any wine. What were we thinking? We even brought the wine suitcase with us, but we neglected to fill it. Oh well… here are some photos.
Forst Brewery… 
It’s also a restaurant. Very close to the hotel where we stayed. 
Agriculture is big in Sud Tyrol. 
So are lakes! 
And beautiful mountain creeks… 
Who needs to get out of the car?
As it got closer and closer to lunchtime, we started looking for places to eat. We found a little roadside restaurant called Ristorante Al Molin in a tiny town called Cloz in Trentino. They had an unusual way of luring in guests. Besides the usual signs, there was a table set up on the other side of the road with several bottles of wine and some fruit laid out. Bill saw it and immediately decided to pull over. It was a good place to stop. The food turned out to be excellent. I did have to use Google Translate a bit. What did I ever do without it?
Bill loved his tagliatelle with Bolognese sauce… 
I had cheese ravioli with bacon. Bacon makes everything better, right? 
That table was a draw. I think it attracted some German bikers, too. 
This cute little pooch sat next to us… 
Italians are graphic about warning drivers. 
I would have been easily talked into having dessert at this place. The lady who waited on us seemed extremely nice, although she apologized for not speaking much German (that’s okay, we don’t speak much either). A large Italian family showed up as we were finishing, along with four male German bikers (as in bicycles). The German guys were funny. They appeared to be good friends and they were joking around. At one point, the little dog in the pictures above sneezed. One of them said “Gesundheit!” We shared a laugh… and then the bee met its fate with my foot!
I’m pretty sure it was a bee that got me. When I pulled the sandal off of my foot, the stinger was still deeply stuck in my skin. Bill managed to swipe the bee off of me, but the stinger took some doing to remove. It really hurt! And it was also itchy and made me swell up. The little fucker. For some reason, the bees and wasps have been murder this year… although I have not yet encountered any murder hornets.
The bee sting kind of took the wind out of our sails, so we headed back to the hotel and had a couple of drinks at the bar. Then it was time for dinner, which was better than the mushroom fiasco, but not as good as Monday night.
On the way up the mountain to Parcines. You can see the waterfall in the distance. 
Wednesday night’s wine… a local white to go with my St. Peter fish. 
Beef consumme with a buckwheat dumpling. 
Bill’s deep fried cauliflower. 
Ravioli stuffed with pesto. 
Bill’s lamb, which he enjoyed. 
My John Dory/St. Peter fish. Not bad. 
Extraneous silverware. 
And dessert… some kind of warm cake that tasted a little like a donut.
By this point, I was starting to look forward to going home… although I can’t deny that Sud Tyrol is stunningly gorgeous. There was a lot of partying going on Wednesday night, too.