Sunday, 4th October
We woke early. Overnight it had rained, and the clouds were lifting slowly from the nearby hills. It was calm and the lake was perfectly still. Soon we were on our way - Italy here we come, all we had to do was cross the Alps.
Our planned route was towards Lake Luzern, then south through the San Gottardo tunnel. It's a route we know well from our many family trips over the years to Lake Garda and Tuscany at Easter. We have seen the mountains in all kinds of weather from bright sunshine to driving snow. This time it was a mixture of cloud and sunny intervals. As I drove along, a line from 'The Prelude' occurred to me, "A day of silver clouds and sunshine on the grass." No wonder Wordsworth loved the Alps, it must have reminded him of his childhood landscape of 'The Lakes', but recast on an epic scale, like a sonata re-written as a symphony.
Romantic notions soon evaporated as we ground to a halt. Slowly the queue of traffic converged into a single lane. A new traffic light system sends vehicles through the 17km San Gottardo tunnel in batches. It's safer, but somewhat slow.
We needed diesel, so as soon as we emerged from the tunnel we headed to the nearby service area. Swiss service areas are not 'the cathedrals of despair that you find in the UK' but bright, airy with a restaurant serving-up a varied menu of freshly cooked dishes. Why can't we have that at home?
From the tunnel it's a 30km. downhill coast towards Locarno. You are in Italian speaking Switzerland here at the northern arm of Lago Maggiore; After the chocolate-box cute Swiss valleys to the north it all looks slightly dishevelled - a sort of Swiss shabby-chic. A few kilometres further on we crossed into Italy. Although the road on the western shore of Maggiore is shown as a trunk road on the map, actually it is narrow, with rock overhangs and single track sharp bends. Driving it is made even more hair-raising by the stream of tour buses heading north from the Italian lake resorts of Stresa and Verbena. Our progress was further hampered by a series of road works. Eventually we arrived at ACSI campsite at Ghiffa. We had the place to ourselves. The facilities were simple, but well looked after. The owner gave us a pitch halfway-up the steeply terraced site.
I was about to grumble about the steepness of the access road and the difficulty of manoeuvring a 7 metre van into a short pitch, then I saw the view; you would have to be a real philistine to moan with the prospect of a blue lake and cloud topped mountains stretched out before you.
A footpath led from the Campsite entrance to a tunnel under the busy lakeside road. This way you could access a small shingly beach without being flattened by the traffic. We took an evening stroll down to the lake. It was lovely, but too enclosed for a long stay. Although you couls see the nearby lakeside village of Ghiffa, there was no easy way to reach it on foot. We decided that tomorrow we would move on again to the southern end of the lake.
Monday, 5th October
Again a day of slightly frustrated plans. We had found a coach park in the l;akeside resort of Stresa and planned to have a lunch stop there, before finding a campsite at the southern end of the lake. Although we found the parking place it was full with tour coaches, so we drove on. Through Verbena and Baveno. Here the lake is very close to one of the highest parts of the Alps, which includes the Matterhorn. We came round a corner just south of Baveno, and there they were, a glittering chain of snowy peaks under a blue sky. By the time Gill switched-on her mobile, they had gone. Just because you don't have photo does not mean you won't remember them we agreed. We have become snap happy. We arrived at Camping Solcio in the early afternoon. Again, it is attractively situated by the side of the lake with a small marina and a promenade along the shore.
After we returned from our walk, we had coffee and chocolate (Lindt and Lavazza, yum!). The weather forecast was not looking great for the next couple of days and we agreed there was little point in sitting watching the rain come down and we might as well move on, even though we still had not paused at all on our way south for more than one night.
Tuesday, 6th October
One place I have wanted to visit for years is Ravenna. The ancient city is situated on the Adriatic coast about 50 miles south of Venice. It was too far to drive in one hop from Maggiore. This posed a small problem as outside of the main tourist areas most Italian campsites close on 30th September, and stopping places for motorhomes - sostas - are few and far between in the Po valley. Other bloggers mentioned a free place to sleep on the outskirts of a small town called Soragna. We found the co-ordinatesin the Camperstop book and headed for there, but not directly. As we are travelling on a shoestring budget we try to find alternative routes to toll motorways. Maisy is so slow, there is no point travelling on a motorway, because we can't go much faster than 50mph anyway.
The problem in Italy is that the trunk roads tend to go through the middle of built up areas and their road surfaces are notoriously pot-holed. Undaunted we set off on the 'red road' which runs parallel to the Milan - Bologna autostrada. It sure did live up to its reputation. We bumped, squeaked and jolted through the flat marshy landscape oif the Po valley, trundling past rice-fields and through straggling industrial villages. In some ways it was an interesting journey, certainly well off the usual tourist track. Perhaps England would have looked like this, with busy looking rural towns ringed by small factories and engineering works, had dear old Margaret not decided to vandalise our manufacturing base. There is however a limit to which you can sustain a journey purely on the basis of its socio-economic appeal.
We had both had enough of the lunar-like craters on the road, muttering darkly that they were 'worse than Portugal'. At Piacenza we caved and headed onto the autostrada. Gill had found an interesting looking secure parking place on the outskirts of Modena, called Camping Club Mutina. In the end our short hop along the motorway only cost 7 euros, a small price to pay to avoid shattered nerves. The place in Modena proved excellent, once I had managed to negotiate the tangentiale at rush-hour. Ravenna tomorrow, but not by the rocky road, I think we will expend another few euros to use the autostrada, I do wonder if avoiding them is false economy, the few euros saved could be easily wiped out by damage to the tyres or suspension caused by vibration of constantly hitting pot-holes at speed.
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