Lakes and Mountains
Day 4 of the holiday (if you count the day we arrived, which I do). This was going to be one of the “big ticket” days where we actually had a plan. We had a specific target of where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do. The plan was to visit Villa del Balbianello on the shores of Lake Como. It was one of the filming locations for Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. Wikipedia describes it as the lake retreat. As far as our kids were concerned it is the place where Anakin married Padmé. There have been plenty of other films set there too, but the kids only pay attention to the films they like.
We began the day as we often do, with Kas getting up early and going for a run. She got back at 8:30 and we made breakfast at 9am again, leaving the hotel at about 10:30.
Colouring In – Monza e Brianza
We hadn’t really decided the best way to get to the Villa. On the Sunday night we’d decided to drive up to Bellagio and try to catch a boat over the lake. That would add a bit of extra “tourist” to the day. We’d decided this at the same time as realising that we couldn’t go to the Villa on a Monday (because it’s shut) and so deciding to go to Bergamo instead (see previous post).
On the way up to Bellagio we had the opportunity to engage in some geocache map colouring. That’s the exercise whereby you stop once in each possible administrative subdivision of a country and do a single cache so that it get’s “coloured in” on maps on various statistics websites. In Italy the smallest administrative subdivision is the “province”, of which there are well over a hundred in total. We’d already completed Milan and Bergamo on previous days. I’d failed to raise enough energy to make special trips out to do Lodi and Cremona while we were staying near Milan. I’d resolved not to make special trips out. It was supposed to be a family holiday, not just a big caching trip. This day gave us the opportunity (if we drove the right route) to colour in three provinces.
The first of the three was Monza e Brianza. I’d had some troubles with this as the caches I’d downloaded into GSAK only contained 8 in the whole province. None of those were anywhere near where we were going. Further research revealed that the problem was just that the GSAK macro I use to populate the provinces in the database is really inaccurate. I did wonder why the province of Monza e Brianza apparently didn’t contain any of the caches in either Monza or Brianza…….
Thankfully I was able to target some specific caches by working through individual maps and figuring out whether caches were inside the right province or not. Anyway, I digress. Initially we pulled off the road into the town of Agrate Brianza to do a cache by a church. Upon reading the logs discovered it wasn’t there, so we moved on. We completed the province with a drive-by just off the motorway in the town of Vimercate.
Colouring In – Lecco
My next target was a roadside stop at a small church in the Province of Lecco. We’d been in the car for a while by this point, so not long after this cache we stopped at a garage to use the toilets and buy bottled water. We were still some way from Bellagio. From here we drove through the town of Lecco, which is at the foot of the lower-eastern branch of the lake, and continued from here along the ever narrowing road that runs along the lakeside. The road was a bit scary when driving a large and unfamiliar vehicle.
Parking in Bellagio looked like it was going to be a challenge. As is often the case though. we got lucky and found one fairly quickly. Once we’d figured out how to pay for parking and used the toilet again we wandered off in the general direction of the centre of town trying to understand how to buy tickets for a boat, and where we actually wanted to catch a boat to. It took us several attempts to find the right place. So we joined a relatively short queue and bought ourselves tickets for a boat that was just about to arrive. Ideal.
We are sailing…
The boat ride over was very pleasant and gave us loads of opportunity for taking photos of the lake. The boat took us over from Bellagio to Lenno, which was the closest stop to Balbianello, requiring about a mile of walking at a leisurely pace.
On the way there we passed a puzzle geocache that I’d solved, and this allowed us to tick off the Province of Como. The cache was a bit awkward to get at and when I was trying to put it back in place I dropped it, and heard the proverbial clanking noises of doom. The cache had dropped to an irretrievable place in the back of a road sign. The attached magnets had taken a serious grip and I couldn’t get it out. D’oh ! And to make matters worse we walked about half of the 1km into Balbianello before I realised I’d left my hat behind, so I had to run back again to fetch it.
Up the Villa!
By the time I caught up with the girls they were at the entry gate deciding which tickets to buy. We went with the “gardens only” option as we were a bit tight for time. Also, the girls don’t really do “insides” of things. The gardens are perfectly manicured and make a great contrast with the stark beauty of the lake and mountains behind. The bit where the wedding scene took place in the Star Wars film was easy to find. There’s a fairly obvious tree in the background, and was a mass of people queuing up to get their photos taken. It took a little while before we could get ours.
We spent about 90 minutes in the gardens photographing as many things as possible before deciding it was all far too hot. The walk back to Lenno was at slightly above geological speeds. Once there, we retired to “The Ice Cream Factory” for the day’s mandatory ice cream. Kas and I both had a slushie though (known as a “granita” here).
We just had time to eat the ice creams and sit by the lake for 20 minutes before our boat arrived. At this point we started to discuss strategy to get the girls their promised trip to a beach. We decided the best bet was to try to go to one of the ones that came up in a google list that was on the way back. The boat back was boaty, and the car was where we’d left it, which is always useful.
Driving Home
We decided that the road up from Lecco had been so bad that the road down to Como couldn’t possibly be worse. That’s where most of the beaches were anyway. So we picked our way around the village and headed off back down the “other” road out of town. As it turned out, the road to Como could most definitely be worse. It was narrower, more twisty, and had a lot of blind corners. It also didn’t seem to have any empty parking spaces anywhere near any of the beaches, despite the fact that it was well into the evening by this time.
The further along we went, the worse I was feeling about the driving. It was very stressful. So at the point where I had a real problem, we decided to give up and just go home.
Thankfully we arrived in the town of Como without having hit anything, and after a bit of queuing and upsetting the locals by not knowing which lane to get into, we escaped the town and headed back down the motorway towards Milan. I was so tired of driving that I decided I couldn’t be bothered with finding a cache in the Province of Varese. I hadn’t found any near to main roads, so it would have been quite a time consuming exercise. So we just drove back home.
A Quiet Evening
We got back to the hotel at 8pm. We decided to have a quick shower and return to the Monte e Mare restaurant we’d been to the night previously. That wasn’t possible though, because they were closed on Tuesdays. So instead we returned to “Zhu MaoChao”, where we’d been on the evening we arrived. We knew at least that the kids would find something they’d eat. We’d done most of our packing already too, because it was our final night in Milan. The following day we were heading off to explore some more of the country.
