St. Ulrich to Trieste, Day 13 - Nimis to Montina

Friday July 3, Nimis to Montina

We headed past vineyards toward the woods, optimistically assuming that yesterday's struggles with brambles and fallen trees on trails were local to some past weather event in Gemona--like the storms that rearranged trails along the Eno River in Durham last year.

We assumed wrong. Turns out the lush environment in this part of Friuli, in combination with extreme weather events common in the Friulian Alps and Prealps, often leads to washouts and rapid trail overgrowth. Limited volunteer resources mean many trails go unmaintained. 

Butcher's broom. Very poky. Avoid.

The cost of our attempt this morning: a mishap ending with a bent hiking pole.

S engineered a repair that kept the broken pole functional enough for the rest of the trip, and ordered a replacement part that was waiting for us when we returned to Germany. 

Because hope springs eternal, we continued up the trail, navigating one fallen tree...

...after another,...

...before giving up, retracing our steps, and aiming for the same rural highway we had taken a bus to avoid walking on the day before.

Fortunately, there was a big difference between rush hour traffic in a small city and mid-morning traffic between rural towns. 

We soon left Nimis behind...

...and passed from one rural village...

...to another...

Every village we passed through had a church with a tower. The 10th-12th c. medieval bell tower in Racchiuso was originally a lookout tower. 

It was transformed into a bell tower starting June 1, 1448, as inscribed by the masons who did the work. The inscription is famous for being one of the oldest known  written examples of the medieval Friulian language. MCCCCXLLVIII ∙ fo ∙ chomen / chat lo tor ∙ de ∙ Reclus / lo primo dì de cugno / Pieri ∙ e Toni so fradi de Vergnà. (1448. Was begun the tower of Racchiuso on the first day of June. Pieri and Toni, brothers of Vergnà.)

The biggest church in Faedis, Maria Assunta, dates from the 1900s, but retains artworks from the 14th-c. church that preceded it. The bell tower is 14th c. 

This painting dates itself in the banner across the top:
ANO DNI MDXVI DIE XXX OCTOBRIS
(30 October, 1516) 

We hiked uphill out of Faedis and could easily see as far as Udine, the city on a hill on the horizon.

On the outskirts of Faedis, I took photographs while S checked maps. He was confident that the next scheduled trail in the woods would be a navigable forest road, because hope springs eternal.

To get to the trail in the woods, we passed a lot of fruit. Below, artichokes graced the end of every row of grapes in this vineyard.

As we reached Campeglio,...

...we passed the tallest bell tower we'd seen that day. The interwebs say both the church and tower were destroyed in the 1976 earthquakes, so these are new structures (although the bell tower looks, at least from afar, like it was restored). 

Three miles outside of Montina, we made one last attempt to hike over a hill and and through the woods, where we got scratched by brambles and bitten by blood-sucking insects that laughed--haha!--at the picaridin that I had by now carried 165 miles across mountains and foothills and plains for just such an occasion. So we bailed yet again--here's the clear path on which we ultimately escaped--and stuck to paved roads the rest of the way to Montina.

We passed the wee Chiesa di San Rocco, which looked impressively at ease without a big bell tower. It was closed, so we couldn't peek inside.

We stayed at another Agriturismo, B&B Emma. We were the only guests, it was ridiculously inexpensive, our room was spacious and air conditioned, and breakfast was very good. 

I had only brought two pairs of hiking socks with me this year, having decided in previous years that a third pair was unnecessary. By the end of Day 13, I was down to just two socks, one from each pair.

For dinner, we walked back up the road a bit to Togliano...

...and ate at a mom & pop's spot, Trattoria al Passeggio. Mom was pretty confident that we were hiking the "Camino" (presumably the Camino Celeste, which passes near Togliano and runs from Aquileia to Mount Lussari near Tarvisio). S managed to convey through pastiched Spanish-French-Italianish (Romance languages are all kinda the same, right?) that we were hiking from St. Ulrich to Trieste, and Mom gave us a "no way! Well, to each his/her own, I guess" look...  

Ta da! 13.6 of the day's 15.4 miles, 800' up, 1,000' down.