I’ve been writing this down in bits here and there, finally I found some time to finish it all. It’s been nearly six weeks since we flew back, so some of the details might be hazy or even, sharp intake of breath, wrong. Sorry.

BTW, I have actually been working solidly since my last post, so I won’t get fired for another day at least.

Anyway:

Saturday, 9th

We were undecided about how to get Stansted first of all. It’s quite a way in Essex, which is on the side of London from us. In the end we drove, although with hindsight I would probably choose the train next time. It was pretty damn busy on the roads. We left late and instantly got stuck in Hammersmith traffic, then met more large swathes of cars on the M25. We made it in time in the end though, thankfully. I don’t know, but I don’t think Ryanair will put you on another flight if you miss your one. I think it’s one of their ways of keeping the costs down.

The flight and Treviso airport were funny. The flight was as many people as possible crammed into a 737. The airport was little more than a shed. A small shed. However, this did have the advantage that we were out of their after about ten minutes, luggage, hire car and all. We had asked them for a micro hire car, a 106 or a Punto or something. They had run out of tiny cars and so gave us a 206 instead. It was neat. Power steering, CD player, Air Con (joy!) and more besides.

Louisa and Alberto met us at the airport and it turned out they only lived about ten minutes down the road in a little town called Quinto de Treviso. A roadside settlements more than a town, but it was perfectly pleasant and their apartment was really nice with big nice-wood doors and windows, decks at the front and back and two bathrooms. It even had three bedrooms remarkably, even though it was quite small. We had our own double bed and everything.

After we’d settled in we went out to get food. Louise just starting to get the hang of driving on the wrong side whilst Alberto directed her around the countryside and me and Louisa caught up on all the water that had gone under the bridge since we last saw each other, some three years previous.

We went to Alberto’s parents home town of Conegliano for drinks. We met and failed to converse with one of Alberto’s friends, I think his name was Pepe, but I’m not sure. He was nice enough and set the pattern of speaking enough English to be friendly and to compliment London in some way. We drank Spritz, a local refresher made with white wine, something called Aperol and something else as well. It was really nice actually. In fact, I wouldn’t mind one right now. Must get Louisa to ship me a bottle of Aperol.

After drinks we drove up into the hills a bit as it got dark to a pizzeria perched on the hillside. Alberto making the decisions, but very well, the pizza was fine and the beer cheap. I tried more local drinks, a digestif which was basically and alcoholised lemon sorbet. There were lemons growing in the trees around us as we sat on the veranda.

After the meal, Alberto took us further into the hills to a little village (potentially called San Lucia Di Piave) where they were having something called a Sagra. A sagra is where the whole town opens up and events are laid on along normal party lines - drinking, music, etc. However, all the tradespeople of the town open up their workshops and demonstrate their skills to visitors. We went at about midnight and there were hundreds of people wandering about. The trades on display including glass staining, wood carving of many kinds, clothwork and lots of other bits and bobs. The atmosphere was really cool, with lots of people of all ages - even teenagers! - milling around, drinking and having a good time. We were probably the only non-Italians, refreshingly. It’s a shame we don’t have any town-scale parties like that in this country. Here we treat large inclusive parties as if they’re the end of the universe.

We met up with some other friends of Alberto’s and hung around and drunk beer and soaked up the atmosphere for a bit. Louise liked the fish craved from sponge, I liked the names of the bands that were playing. One was called “Wild Gosling” :-)

Sunday, 10th

The next day we got around to the real holiday business - the beach! We drove out to a beach at Caorle. This was far enough from Venice not to be packed. It was a big beach and the sand was very hot. Too hot to stand on with bare feet. I went straight into the sea. It was lovely. It was really nice and warm. It wasn’t too clear, but you can’t have it all. It was very shallow as well and I had to walk out for a bit before I could jump in properly. It was lovely though. I really like swimming. Then we played frisbee for a while. It was too windy, but frisbee in the sun was one of the main motivations for the holiday. We hung around at the beach all day, getting food from a little restaurant up the beach from where we were sitting and working on that tan.

It really worked as well, the next morning my face was a completely different colour.

Monday, 11th

On the Monday Louise and went to Venice. She’d been before, but it was my first time in the city. We went to Treviso and got a train. I drove, my first time on the right. It’s crazy, it was hard working out all all the Italian conventions for signs and such at the same time. The train was cheap, but very hot and had no A/C. Thankfully the windows did provide a nice breeze. The track into Venice runs across a five kilometre bridge and you can see the city sticking up out of the lagoon coming into view. It is a weird place.

The train station is on the far side of the city from San Marco square and other touristy bits, so we wandered down through the little side streets and over the little bridges across mini canals. That was really beautiful. By the time we got to the Rialto though I was really hot and sticky, it was about 37° and most humid. We had lunch at a little place in the little streets. It was too near to the Rialto and was dead pricey.

San Marco was a bit of an anti-climax, the palace at the end is quite decrepit. It didn’t help that we really wanted to sit down, but they had cops moving people on from the steps around the square! Wankers. After that I had a minor heat crisis. I was just really pissed off by being all sweaty and uncomfortable. I was also really tired from having bread and walking around (bread makes me really tired as I digest the wheat). We found a place round the corner to sit for a while and then Louise suggested that we take a canal bus down the main canal and around the island. That was cool because we got to sit and be quite cool and check out some of the sites. Well worth €3.50.

After that we decided to wander a bit more and find some food. This we failed to do on a major scale. Venice is full of crap restaurants selling “Spaghetti with tomato sauce” and other really crap food. We walked past hundreds of these places looking for somewhere better. This was stupid because we ended up walking for hours being snobbish and then when we were too tired to walk any more we sat down at a place and the food was only average. Silliness. I was very surprised by the total dearth of good places to eat. It is Italy after all, every other town or city has fantastic food.

Tuesday, 12th

On Tuesday we did nothing. We got up late and then hung around reading our books. It was good. I was reading Pattern Recognition by Gibson. It’s mostly set in London and I felt almost as if I was back home as I read. He’d researched the locations very thoroughly. Since I’ve been back I’ve visited some of the key locations, Portobello Road, Camden market and stood outside the Pilates place in Neal’s Yard. If only I could visit the locations in Tokyo and Moscow.

Wednesday, 13th

Refreshed from our relaxing, we decided to drive up to Lake Garda in the lovely hire car. It was about 2 hours drive at the 150km/h which everybody does on the autostrada. I drove. It was great fun caning it down the outside lane. I was most disappointed to find out that 150km/h is only about 95 when we got back to the UK. The car was much more shaky than Louise’s Polo and it felt much faster.

We got to Garda at about three, having hung around at Louisa and Alberto’s for too long, but it was gorgeous when got there. We sat and had ice cream first before setting off to find a relatively empty beach. Garda doesn’t have sandy beaches which is as much of a blessing as it is a curse in reality, the pleasure of not having to fight with sand is most relaxing.

We did find a nice little patch a couple of kilometres north of Garda the town. We swam. It was a touch colder than the sea, though I still managed to get Louise it. It was so clean and nice. No salt, no chlorine, just pure water. The wind was blowing the water around a fair bit and the swimming was damn good exercise. It was pretty sunny still and once out of the lake it was only moments before I was dry enough to continue my reading.

When we’d finally had enough swimming we decided to drive around the lake to look for a place to eat and maybe find a hotel to stay in. Since it had taken us so long to get up there it seemed a shame to rush off again. We set off north along the shore. The drive was beautiful, the lake and it’s mountains are very pretty and we just trotted up the road staring out of the windows as much as possible. At the northern end there is a large patch of crazy geology with huge angular blocks of rock jutting out of the silt dropped by the rivers feeding the lake. We stopped there, at Riva del Garda, for snacks and to question some hoteliers, then we continued round and headed south down the opposite shore.

Our southbound leg, through mountains on the western side of the lake, was even more terranious. The rock falls steeply into the lake and a large portion of the route is in tunnels. It was very much your classic alpine curvy little roads, though still gentle enough to cruise around. The tunnels were fun. The route was dotted with many hotels and we stopped at quite a few to ask about rooms. Often the hotels would have a car park and an entrance at the road level and then descend several stories down the mountainside to the lake front. An excellent idea, the rooms must all have had lovely views. We stopped many times to take pictures and just sit and look. We were still wandering though really and we pressed on until we reached Salo.

Salo had lots of hotels and we’d already asked at loads, so we drove straight into town for food. We had funny pizza at a slightly crazy place where the waiters sported barcode readers and the walls were adorned with really, really soft porn. It was called Tip Tap as well, and the toilets were decorated like a 10-year olds racing car bedroom. The reflection of the black and white check in the door knobs on the toilet doors reminded me of a POV demo raytrace.

On our final hotel trawl we got sucked in by the attraction of the Grand Hotel Gardone. We stopped to ask how much the rooms were, €180 for a room with a balcony and a lake view. We were unsure so they let us see it first, after that we took it. We went out for drinks nearby and encountered the funniest and simultaneously most terrifying northern English holidaymakers ever. One of them sounded exactly like Johnny Vegas and the topics of their conversation made us giggle into our glasses.

Thursday, 14th

A night’s sleep is a night’s sleep. Though it was nicely air conditioned, it’s the morning after that counts when splashing out on a night in a posh hotel. Stacks of food and armies of waiters kicked off the day. I love the kind of breakfast you only have in a good hotel. That’s the only time I eat prunes, for good reason, but I do like them in my posh Muesli.

Then there was the lake view in all it’s glory and the hotels lake front sun-bathing and jumping in area. We could have gone for the pool, but it’s just no fun compared to Garda and we swam for an hour or so. Afterwards we stole all the moveable items and decided to try and drive up north of the lake and into the Alps a bit more.

Ah, now, picture the scene. We’re driving up a winding road and I’m still making comments along the lines of “Italian drivers blah blah blah” when we start to notice that the traffic southbound is much much heavier than that going north. We didn’t think much of it at first, but the wind started kicking up and the sky ahead looked grey. I realised that as most of the people around were probably tourists, it wasn’t so surprising that people would be heading away from this weather and towards the sun. We got a shock then, when the hail started falling. It was big hail and it banged on the bonnet and roof quite seriously. With the wind and the mountains, Louise jumped to the conclusion that it might be rocks being blown from the slopes. We panicked, I had visions of the windscreen caving in and the car being bashed to shit. Then we realised it was just ice and the car could probably take it. Soon it turned to torrential rain though and it was impossible to move at more than 20km/h. As we started to get into the first tunnels we found people stopped at the exits, hiding from the weather. We joyfully did the same and I grabbed a chance to let my shoulders drop after the bombardment.

We were able to continue at a slow speed up the shore and the sun came out before we made it back to Riva. We saw lovely views of the rain retreating down the lake. As we came into Riva we hit a second wave. Torrential rain and a slightly worrying amount of lightening, very close by as well, striking each of the highest outcrops seemingly in turn. It didn’t bode well for our drive into the mountains. We in fact spent about half an hour lost in Riva’s one-way system trying to avoid the autostrada to Trento so that we could see more. Exploring the little roads around Riva we got to see lots of the geography which made me happy.

Finally we found our way out and the weather lifted again. We cruised through valleys of vines and climbed quickly up into the hills. We passed picturesque castles, lakes and villages. Suddenly we hit a tunnel that took us down and down until we hit Trento, a small city spread across hills. It reminded me a bit of the bay area from when I visited Melisssa, with dense residential areas packed on to pretty steep hillsides. From Trento we burned our way back down the autostrada and made it to Louisa and Alberto’s house as it got dark. Just in time to steal some of their dinner in fact.

Friday, 15th

On Friday we went to Alberto’s parents house in Conegliano. In Italy, as in Germany and other European countries, it seems to be the done thing to save up for ages and then build yourself a sparkly house when you reach middle age. Alberto’s parents house was no exception. It was slightly out of town and very new and very well appointed. We played frisbee on their large lawn for a fair old while. Working on the tan and the muscle tone.

In the evening loads of Louisa and Alberto’s friends joined us for a barbecue. Mucholi (not sure of the spelling, sorry!) cooked up a ton of meat and some polenta and fish for Louise and we all go riotously drunk on various kinds of crazed Italian beverage. I started on beer, then we had spritz and wine and finally what I lovingly called Citrus Aftershock, a homemade contraption of serious potency. I seem to remember that the evening went pretty random after that with lots of drunken guitar playing and some very bad drumming. The whole thing was pretty hilarious really, not understanding a word of what anyone was saying and just grinning stupidly.

To finish it all off we went and played frisbee again. The only lights there were just served to make it even harder to see the other players, let alone the frisbee itself. The frisbee soon vanished and was sadly not seen again for the rest of our time in Italy.

Saturday, 16th

We sort of planned to meet up with Alberto’s gang again the next day. They were headed north towards the Dolomites and Louise and I had been thinking about going to the mountains previously. A guided tour from Alberto sounded good to us as well. Alberto was planning to take us to Capri, but apparently the traffic was really bad, so we just drove into the alpine foothills.

The drive up into the hills was cool. Really steep and windy roads all the way up and up for ages. I had loads of fun driving it, though it’s quite tiring. At the top we could see for miles. We probably could have seen Venice had it been clearer. We found Alberto’s pals and hung out for a bit, there were the Milka cows as well and Louise became acquinted with an absolutely huge shire horse and his owner. Not sure what Alberto’s friends were planning but we headed further up for a walk.

At the very top it was pretty bleak, not especially for a mountain top I guess, but people were sunbathing! Yes, there’s little polution etc, but it wasn’t warm. It was cool however :-). We wandered around the gorse for a bit and I took pictures of civilisation down below us. Louise conquered the dragons. It was really very lovely. I was happy to spend more time out in nature.

In the evening, after conquering the way back down the hill, Alberto took us to a restaurant he’d been visiting as long as he could remember. It was wonderfully located. Up a tiny steep driveway, nestled in amongst soft hills, with vines covering the dining area and a view down the little valley of more vines. It was the very definition of pituresque. I may have slipped in the world of stock photography for a moment.

The menu was pretty good to. It basically consisted of meat. They told us what they happened to be cooking that day and we opted to eat almost all of it. We got pork and chicken and lots of gorgeous vegetables with tonnes of olive oil. I’ve been trying to replicate those vegetables ever since I got back, but it never quite works out. They didn’t have any fish, but the vegetarian main course was a steak of cheese. I think it was Halloumi from the texture, but it was weird city. Louise only ate a few bites as there were plenty of other things on the table for her. But still. Cheese. Madness.

I ate a huge amount of meat, but Alberto ate probably twice as much as me. A ludicrous quantity. I really wanted to keep up with him, but it was totally impossible. Italian training. I left enough room for the digestif though.

Sunday, 17th

And on Sunday we flew back, discovered that all the trimmings on our hire car were sorely missed and found that Tom had failed to water the garden enough in the searing heat and that it was all dead. Holiday over.