Auronzo.

Fear and trembling.

Heading home to meet up with the daughter, her partner and an Australian couple who've been living in England for a while. The owner's husband at the hotel in Bled insists on dropping me to the station and he's worried that I haven't had breakfast so he stops at a pastry shop for me. He loves Australia, he's been there three times for rowing competitions, Slovenians are sports mad he tells me. In the summer Lake Bled is filled with rowers.

I take the bus to Villach in Austria and then take the train to Venice. Settled down, I stare out into the landscape and suddenly there is snow! Lots of it! The excitement of a person who comes from a hot climate to see this wonderful white wintered landscape is profound. I'm reading a book about Russia and the Jews during WW2 in the winter, working on the rail lines and I am transported to an emotional imagining of what it must have been like for them, the back breaking work with hardly any clothes, scant food, in below zero temperatures and I am in awe of the human spirit of survival. I pull myself back into the present as the snow disappears as we make our way down to Venice.

I meet up with the family and we pick up a hire car, a Jeep with snow tyres. I'm slightly nervous as I've never driven in snow and ice conditions. It rains all the way to Auronzo, I am hunched and tense over the wheel in case of black ice and it rains most of the way. The trip is slow. We arrive, I shrug the tension from my shoulders, we shop and buy an essential relaxant - ingredients for a Spritz. That night, the sun sets, 24 carat gold and then pinks and amethyst hues over the mountain and a full moon starts to pop up, pale gold.

The landscape has changed so much, rich reds, burnt orange, ochred trees. The next day I pick up our visitors and we go for pizza. The sister-in-law mumbles and shakes her head when she knows that we are lunching on pizza. In her day, pizza was only consumed at night. We survive the experience and as usual, on our way out, they set out chilled glasses of homemade Limoncello, cloudy and fragrant. We spend the rest of the afternoon wandering around the edge of the chilling lake, catching up.

The next day we decide to go to Lake Misurina. There is a mention of snow but there's always a mention but it rarely happens. Suddenly we see quite a lot of it and suddenly we enter into a world of white, magical and dangerous - as further along, we discover. Up in front of us a Porsche pulls to a stop and beyond it, other cars have stopped. There's hardly any room to turn and the snow is almost a metre high on the sides. I try to move the car but we just slide. I am thinking we may be spending the night in our Jeep or trying to turn back and having to pay the excess for damage on the car - worst scenarios. Then the Porsche makes a run for it and slides into the bank but then rights itself and so I hand the wheel over to our male driver and we hold on tight, our hands sweating, my foot on a pretend brake and we skid around and slowly, without using the brake, head back down the hill. We all breathe again and see the snow plough arriving and then they close off the road. Biggest adventure outside my volcano climb in my life!

We visit Cortina the next day, snow is at a distance and the roads ploughed and safe. There's a beautiful store there called the COOP and I make some Xmas purchases, a small Xmas tree, candles, mugs, a tablecloth. It'll be our first Xmas in Italy. On the way back we pass distant snow covered mountains, churches on hills. I make rabbit stew with olives and polenta for dinner - a typical Auronzane meal. And I make Bombardinos as the temperature begins to plummet. Too cold for snow, we're told but we're ever hopeful.

We awake to a light dusting of snow but rain dissolves it. The visitors are leaving us and in a couple of days, we also will be on our way to different locations.