Italian party-season was still in full swing and the last revellers woke us in the early hours as they rowdily left the bar. Not long after, the morning bus service took over, honking their way around the blind corners of the windy lakeside road above. Cheers guys! Van-life tiredness was taking it’s toll on all of us. The kids were starting to look like little zombies with pasty skin and massive bags under their eyes. Good job we were homeward bound today and could catch up with a good night’s sleep tonight.
We breakfasted on the sun loungers by the shore of Lake Como and if the place hadn’t already been giving us the pleasant familiarity of the English Lake District, it certainly made us feel at home when the heavens opened and started tipping it down!
I fancied a morning dip after breakfast and in spite of 5 minutes of coaxing, there were no other takers. The kids couldn’t resist for long once I was in and within a few minutes we were all splashing around, much to the amusement of the other continental campers sheltering comfortably beneath their awnings.
When the kids started to turn blue, we headed back to use the campsite’s facilities where Nina had a lovely hot shower running to warm them up. I, on the other hand, embarked on a rather unpleasant experience…
…mission accomplished, I moved straight on to the hot showers to wash away the indignity…
Nature was calling and the toilet block only had cubicles containing the ‘old-school’ squatting toilets…
When faced with one of these bad boys in the past, I’ve moved quickly on and found a ‘normal’ toilet or just held-on. I decided it was about time that I threw caution to the wind (so to speak) and gave it a go.
Won’t be doing that again in a hurry!
The experience raised more questions than it answered:
- How far down do you pull your trousers?
- How low are you supposed to squat?
- How much training is required to maintain a squat for ‘the duration’ without your legs shaking uncontrollably?
- Does anyone take a newspaper to read? If so, HOW!?
- How does one overcome the fear of a rogue nugget colliding with the aforementioned trousers?
- How on earth do old people use these?
- How many ski-boot wearers end up slipping into these things every year? Especially after a vin-chaud or three!
With my mission accomplished, I moved straight on to the hot showers to wash away the indignity and cheer myself up.
We all filed back to the van and finished packing up. Pulling out of La Forenze for the journey home, we decided to make one last detour via Belaggio. Known as the ‘Pearl of the Lake’, Belaggio sits at the northerly point of a triangular shaped peninsula. The two southern spurs of the lake split here, with Como and Lecco connecting the base.
As we drove, the rain intensified to true Lake District levels and we forded our way round the narrow roads to Bellagio before turning back towards Como. I’m sure the views were spectacular but it was difficult just to see out of the windscreen for most of the journey! We did get a couple of nice breaks though.
We ‘George Clooney spotted’ our way through a very wet Como before rejoining the motorway system and making good progress back towards the Aosta Valley, the Mont Blanc Tunnel and France. We’d been lucky on the way to Italy with ZERO queue at the tunnel but our luck had run out for the return journey. Traffic ground to a halt and we crawled forward and twiddled our thumbs for the next 2 hours. On the plus side, I was lucky enough to see a serac break off the nose of the glacier above, shatter and cascade down the scree slope. Every cloud etc.!
We eventually reached the ticket booths and had a good run through the tunnel and all the way back to Les Gets.
Italy had been an absolute pleasure (apart from the grappa, perhaps!). We met some truly delightful people along the way and the food was right up our street. We are looking forward to going back and spending a bit more time getting to know this fabulous country. In the meantime, I’ll be practicing my squats!
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