Europe 2007 - Part 2 - Northern Italy

Following our time in Germany, we headed south to link up with family in Italy. William’s cousin Brett and his family just happened to be visiting near where we would be staying and at the last minute, we had made plans to meet them.

We stayed in a very nice campground on the west side of Lake Garda near Verona. Here is a picture of our (very nice) 2-bedroom cabin.






The campground had an excellent swimming pool and wonderful staff. For reasons we still don’t quite understand, this campground required that everyone wear bathing caps. When in Italy…… (Do you notice who is not willing to be caught dead on film wearing her bathing cap?)








Brett, Cheryl, Jessica and Isabella found us at the camp and we all went to Salo for dinner and the first of our 1,073 servings of Italian gelato (ice cream). The number might be a bit high, but I’m not kidding when I say we had gelato an average of two times a day in Italy.








This is the view of Salo from near our campground.






The next day, William (white knuckles and all) drove into Desenzano and found the Haswells for a trip into Sirmione (below). Sirmione is a very quaint town at the end of a peninsula that sticks out into Lake Garda at the center of the southern shore. Baths here date from the Roman times. After strolling through the market and eating cherries, we went into the old part of town.
























The next day we took the train from Desenzano into Venice. There are very few streets in Venice and water is the way most everything is moved – including people. So, we took one of the water buses (the larger boats shown here) to St. Mark’s Square.











One could easily spend more than a week just in Venice, so we only hit a few highlights. We made a quick tour of St. Marks shown here and let the kids feed the pigeons. They would have done that all day if we would have let them.






















The big event of the day was the gondola ride. Our gondolier was very nice and sang to us a bit. A few more stops, some more gelato, and we were headed back to Desenzano. The next morning we left for Tuscany.