Day 3 – Lake Maggiore – Tuesday June 29

Today we collect the car from Milan's Linate airport. Linate is the local city ariport and only 6ks from the city centre. We're taking a taxi to the airport, because with all our camping gear, getting round isn't as easy as it was when we arrived two days ago.

The taxi ride to the airport was a bit of an eye opener. Cars and trams compete for the same piece of pavement, or cobblestones as they're more likely to be. In some roads, there is a separate lane for the trams, but the taxi driver seemed to leap into that fairly regularly to queue jump the cars in the car lane. I'm not sure if he was supposed to be there, or if being a taxi gave him some extra privileges, but it made for an interesting trip.

The car this year is a 308cc and the new model has come right into the 21st century, with a GPS as standard and an iPod dock. Peugeot have also come into the 21st century and now email you to confirm your appointment to collect the car. Our first stop is Lake Maggiore, an hour North and West of Milan. Getting there is mainly on the motorway, so a real breeze and with the GPS telling me everything including when there were traffic snarl-ups ahead, it really was very easy.

It's currently 6:10pm on Wednesday and Anne and I have just sat down in the camp ground to a glass of wine. We bought wine glasses today from the supermarket and Anne has just returned from the camp supermarket with a bottle of wine. Much to my surprise, the wine glasses have a square top and, following my instructions to a T, which were, “I don't care what wine it is, as long as it's cold”, I am now sipping contentedly on a glass of chilled RED wine, from my square wine glasses..... WTF?

Anyway, back to yesterday afternoon and the excitement was erecting the tent for the first time. As I mentioned earlier, the tent is self erecting, so taking it out of its bag, I took off the safety harness and threw it up in the air – it sprung itself open and the collapsed on the ground. It didn't exactly open completely, so Anne and I spent a couple of minutes getting it from 2 to 3 dimensions, but once it had been spread out to having 4 corners, the rest of the setup was pretty painless. It's much smaller than we'd originally planned, but is plenty big enough for the two of us, an air bed, with room to stand up and walk around. Most importantly, it has mosquito nets over all the doors and windows. As I said before, taking it down might be a bigger task, but I've been giving it plenty of thought and think I've got it sussed, so we'll see how Saturday's destruction effort goes.

The campground is on the western side of Lake Maggiore near a small town called Feriolo. It is a magical setting, with the campground being right on the lake shore. The village has a couple of restaurants, one of which we are rapidly becoming locals at. We'll be here for a few days visiting the islands on the lake, which have really impressive villas and going to some of the small towns dotted around the lake.