Rest day in Motovun & truffles

The weather forecast was looking quite ominous for day 4 of our Venetians cycling adventure. We were given the option of the planned loop ride with likely rain or a sleep in and massage at our hotel. Gayle and I chose the latter and, after a big ride yesterday, it was the right choice for us. A few others also chose the rest.

As it turned out, the rain held out in the morning, so the others got their 36km ride in. We enjoyed a later breakfast after a great sleep, and both of us had a massage from our lovely soigneur, CiVi (Christiana).

The riders returned around 12 midday, and we met in the hotel lobby to be ferried up to the truffle farm. We arrived at the very scenic Karlić truffles in the village of Paladini. It's a multi generational family business where they propagate and wild harvest black and white truffles. Well, the latter cannot be propagated.

We got to see the truffle dogs (all female) in action, which involved a walk through the Karlić plantation and into the adjoining forest. The best trees for truffles are oak and hazelnut, and it was fun to watch the dogs doing their thing! We learnt lots about truffles and how they grow and how the dogs are trained.

We then walked back to the farm restaurant where we learnt more about cooking with truffles. We sat with Peter (Thomo) and Nicole, both Australian and recently married, along with Jeremy and Emily from California.

We enjoyed fresh bread with truffle oil, truffle balsamic vinegar, truffle powder before watching our host (she's 3rd generation), cooking scrambled eggs with truffles. The scrambled eggs were stunning with truffles in oil used in the eggs and then served with fresh grated truffle on top. It was a lot of truffles, I'll probably smell of them for days to come!

We finished with little doughnuts for dessert - yes, there was truffle in the vanilla cream inside the doughnuts 🍩

We returned to our hotel, and tonight, we have dinner on our own! We decided to walk up the very steep hill to Motovun old town for dinner. Well, we were going to take a shuttle bus but, as we arrived at the bus stop, a large tour bus dropped off a large group of singing Germans (I think they were Germans), so we walked instead.

We pulled into Pizzeria & Grill Smile Motovun (love the name) and ordered beer and pizza. Tony and Theresa from New York were already there, eating gelato for dinner. A few other people from our tour group arrived as we were dining: Murray and Cathy from Brisbane and then Liz and Russ from Melbourne. They're really nice people, and after dinner, we walked down the hill (much better) with Murray and Cathy to our hotel.

It didn't really rain today, but the forecast tomorrow is looking quite ominous - thunderstorms and heavy rain possible - let's hope the forecast is wrong.もっと詳しく