Snowless Ski Resorts

Valle d'Aosta is the mountainous paradise of Northern Italy. It borders both France and Switzerland, and most of the residents speak both Italian and French. Aosta is a beautiful place. It also takes Three hours and three trains to get anywhere good from Milan, but that's alright. Our first stop in Aosta was the eponymous capital, Aosta! A tiny town (at least relative to Milan. Or Cleveland.) in the middle of the Alps, Aosta is still surrounded by much of its medieval walls and at least four of the original guard towers are still standing. Deanna and I took walk around the town to see all the sights highlighted in the map we got at the Tourist Info office where the guy spoke surprisingly good english, and everywhere we turned we saw the snow-capped peaks of the Alps:

Always with the snow blowing off, majestically

We also saw a few of the ancient guard towers,

The sky is SO BLUE

An old Roman Amphitheater,

Really well preserved ruins!

This really cool poster,

Like Toulouse-Lautrec

And a bunch of other stuff (old arches, old buildings, old roads, old churches. And the inspiration for the title of this post, a Ski Resort, snowless. Right outside of the city. We couldn't take the ski lift up the mountain, however. Closed for the week.) but that's boring. And not the point. The point is Aosta is the epitome of Alpian beauty, and there was still snow on mountains in mid-June.

After our grand tour of Aosta we hopped on a bus to our real destination, Cogne. Cogne is another, smaller town south of Aosta which has a ton of trails leading from it out in to the Alpy wilderness. We chose to take the trail to the Cascate di Lilliaz, a set of three thunderously loud waterfalls. Along the way I mingled with some livestock,

Right after it licked me

Hopped on some rocks to the middle of a fast-flowing river,

Such vibrant colors

And was amazed by natural beauty,

You can't see me in this picture but I was definitely amazed

After about an hour we finally arrived at le Cascate di Lilliaz and were greeted with a thunderous roar, courtesy of this waterfall (and its two friends)

The waterfall above is the highest of the three (they are a succession of falls) and has those really inviting rocks right next to the pool the falls cascade in to. Deanna and I were very tempted to get to those rocks to have our lunch, so we took off our shoes and tried to make our way through the pool up to them. The water was freezing (numbing) but we kept on trying. I got face to face with the rocks but couldn't find a way to get around and up on top of them, so I headed back to our HQ rock. Deanna tried her own way and got up on them while I wasn't looking. I turned around, was like "WHATT" for a bit and then made my way over as well. We opened up our cheese and crackers and feasted. Then all of a sudden it was 4:30 and we had to book it out of there if we wanted to get to the bus in time which would get us to the train in time which would get us to the second train in time. So we gathered up our stuff, trudged back through the freezing water and got our shoes back on. On the hike back to the town we stopped at a little grocery store along the way and went in to a real life wine cellar to get our customary wine for the trip back,

All Valle D'Aosta wine. We got the cheapest one

and then hopped on the bus back to Aosta. Then hopped on the train, then hopped on the second train, finished our wine, then were back in Milan. Pretty much the polar opposite of all the nature we had just relished in.