Our first winter this year in Germany was tough. A lot of fun, but tough. So towards the end of winter some friends and I decided it was time for a holiday. We hired a car and drove down to Riva on Lake Garda in Italy for a weekend. Poor Simon was working too hard, and missed out on this one, but I am sure it'll come back around and I'll be the one stuck here working while he goes off travelling without me!
We left from work on Friday night. Luckily three out of the four of us all work at the same school, so Isabel picked up the car, then picked us all up from school. This would have been a huge time saver, except we then had to go via Dachau so that Julie could pick up her massive bag (and I do not exaggerate - I have never seen anyone pack so much for two nights away!) from her house. So we ended up not hitting the road until about 6pm.
The drive down to Lake Garda (or Gardasee as the Germans call it) is really incredible. Even though we were on the motorway almost the whole way, the road took us down through Bavaria, Austria and then into Sud Tirol (Northern Italy). It goes straight through the Alps and there are an incredible number of castles along the way. The trip itself was a pretty big highlight, until our Navman got us completely lost in Sud Tirol. Luckily, there are villages every five minutes in Europe, so we stopped to ask at a little local bar for directions. This was a fairly interesting experience, three German speakers and one English speaker, trying to get accurate directions from three (slightly drunk) Italian speakers. But we made it to Riva around midnight and eventually found our hotel (a Bavarian wirtschaft - leave it to Bavarians, to seek out the only Bavarian hotel to stay in while in Italy!)
We spent the next two days wandering around Riva, drinking a lot of coffee and eating some really excellent pizza and pasta. Riva is a very beautiful little town. It is right on the edge of Garda Lake and is surrounded on all sides by mountains. Lots of old buildings, little winding alleys filled with cafes and restaurants, and excellent, excellent food!
On Sunday we left Riva fairly early so that we could stop in Innsbruck (Austria) for lunch on the way home. Innsbruck is fairly impressive because it is in a valley surrounded by some incredibly high mountains. It also has a nice old town in the city centre, but to be perfectly honest, I think Munich is much nicer. (My Bavarian friends should be pretty happy with that!)
