Living a Dream

This is another you've definitely never heard of. During the trip to Innsbruck, I mentioned that we passed lots of towns and areas that just looked lovely - places we thought we'd fancy a visit to at a later point, but didn't know when. Avio was one of the towns I'd written down as a possibility. It had a castle, it had bike paths on the river, and it was nestled between mountains in the Italian Alps. Avio is a classic "blink and you'll miss it" town, and actually staying there made it seem all the more, well, tiny. We booked a BnB that offered breakfast and free bikes, which meant we could ride up and down the valley as long as our butts could handle it, and that's precisely what we did. We got in early in the afternoon and figured we'd find a place to get something to eat or get some bread or...something, and then we'd check in later in the afternoon. Or maybe we'd go see the castle. Good thing we had the castle as an option, becaus...

I'm just as upset about that title as you are. Bellinzona, Switzerland. Ever heard of it? Of course you haven't - neither had I. We found out about this place because it was one stop past aforementioned Lugano on the train, and it looked just heavenly in photos. It has three main castles from medieval times that are on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and it's nestled between the Alps, so it seemed like a great place for our first-engaged-getaway. We hopped on the train early Saturday and arrived in town to be pleasantly greeted with a huge open-air street market, which has reportedly taken place every Saturday for the past 500 years. How cool is that? Almost by mistake, we stumbled into the first castle and promptly strolled in/around/through it for a good hour before booking it back to the hotel to drop our things off and run back to the other castles. Of course, because it's a beautiful town in the mountains, there's also a river that we had to cross betwee...