Italy Revisited

Well, this is the first post that I didn’t write while on vacation. I guess I petered out with my writing ambition and now it seems like ages since we were there. I will do my best to recap our 2 days in Northern Italy.

We had an early morning flight out of Malaga and arrived back in Milan by noon. This time we rented a car and didn’t have to rely on public transportation. This was both good and bad. Good for the obvious reasons of having the freedom, but bad in that driving in Italy is insane. It’s overcrowded, confusing, and we literally couldn’t figure out how to get gas. I’m not kidding. There are no attendants working at the gas station, none of the instructions on the pump were in English, and did I mention that most of the locals are rude and unhelpful? Thank goodness we didn’t drive too far and had an economical car. I can only imagine what the rental place socked us for bringing the car back empty.

Anyway, back to my story. So we drove up to Lake Como on Saturday. It was a beautiful and stress-free drive up. We stopped for lunch at a great little place overlooking the lake and continued up to Bellagio. We didn’t really know what was there, but it just sounded nice . . . and it was. We parked and walked all over the ritzy little town. We managed to fill our whole day and started to head home in the later afternoon. The drive back did not go nearly as smooth. The traffic got to be nuts, the stress increased, and our love of Italy quickly got knocked down a few notches. As beautiful as Northern Italy is, the proximity to the big, over-crowded and smoggy city of Milan just kills it. Luckily we managed to fight the traffic without any incidents and used our trusty GPS to find the most delightful restaurant near our hotel. This place was out in the middle of nowhere, no English was spoken, but it was the most quaint and elegant place we ate throughout the trip. The food was out of this world and it was worth whatever the heck it cost. Now THAT was the Italian experience that I want to remember.

We originally had plans to travel much further on Sunday, but based on the traffic lessons we learned the day before we decided to stay closer to our home base. We took a much shorter drive up to Lago Magiore instead. We’ve been there before, but there were still new places to see. The day was beautiful and we took a leisurely drive, stopping at all the little villages along the way. The good and bad news was that most of the shops were closed on Sunday. Bad for spending time poking around, but good for saving money. All in all it was a stress-free and easy day of unwinding before our long travel day that would follow.

To see more pictures from this portion of our trip, please click here.