Lidos and Laghi

And some vineyards as well...

By Where's Herr Gruber?

October 8^th, 2020

Buongiorno from Italy

The land of pizza, pasta, wine and spritz. At least to us. Others might also know it as the land of the ancient cities full of palazzi, historical villages, beautiful lakes, edgy mountains, rolling hills with rows of olive trees or... just fast cars (?).

It has been a while since we have posted a new story, and a lot has happend in between. So let us update you on our first weeks in Italy.

Swapping Switzerland for Italy

As you might remember from our last story, we entered Italy via the Maloja pass and ended up at Lake Como. Leaving Switzerland for Italy you immediately see the difference between the two countries. Switzerland with its clean, smooth roads, expensive cars and well restored houses. Then Italy, with its crappy roads, chaos everywhere and honestly shabby looking houses... at least in the border region we entered the country. It felt like worlds apart. But isn’t this exactly the charm of Italy that many people love?

Lake Como

After driving a while, we saw the waters of Lake Como coming up and could not wait to jump in. We found an amazing free camping spot right in the hills, next to a monastery and with pier onto the lake. Simon does not like to use words like amazing and awesome, because he feels they are exaggerating and very American. Nothing in life can be this awesome right? I mean he is German after all, they don’t like to show off. But this spot was amazing, I am sure he agrees. See for yourself.

The other van is our new Latvian friend’s VW T4. We met them at the spot and spend some time together drinking wine, enjoying the view, swapping van stories, cool routes and places to stay. And of course the boys showed each other all their cool van features, boys will be boys.

The next few days consisted of visiting lakeside villages, eating gelato and jumping in the lake from the pier. We tested our outdoor shower as well, which passed the test, because it was both hot and strong. Which means we can wild camp off-grid for days and still smell fresh, isn’t that nice?

We also visited the monastery and I showed Simon how to use my camera. My mom keeps asking for photos of me, so here you go ma:

Lake Iseo

This story is called Laghi (lakes) & Lido’s (seaside or lakeside beach) for a reason, because next up was Lake Iseo. Quite a fairytale of a lake, with its tiny island including a castle or a church? We didn’t find any nice spots to park for free, so we decided on a camping and chilled at the lakeside for two days.

From there on we decided to make a go for Venezia, but with a stopover in Verona for lunch and a stay on this very beautiful vineyard somewhere in between. Where the stay was free if we bought some bottles of wines. Who can say no to that?! The owner was harvesting his grapes as well, which was cool to see.

Boozy Vineyard

When we came back from our wine tasting, we met Chris and Ton, two Dutchies who were also traveling in a Toyota Hiace which was parked right next to us.

Meanwhile there was a very loud party going on at the BBQ area behind us, because an Italian was a celebrating his 52-year-old birthday. Odd number to celebrate, but hey it’s Italy and they probably find any occasion suitable for a celebration. Can’t argue with that. The party ended, the Italians felt sorry for being so loud. So before driving off, honking and wishing (more like shouting) us wonderful holidays, they were all clearly drunk driving, they gave us all their leftover food and wine.

Oh well, we ended up getting drunk as well with Chris, Ton and two other Germans, ate all the food, drank all the wine, and finished two bottles of Limoncello that were suppose to be souvenirs for friends (sorry Chris and Ton’s friends...) and had a really good time. And a hangover the next day...