Day 4 – Lake Maggiore – Wednesday June 30

Well, I'm pleased to report that the first night in the test went well..... very well. Fortunately, the evenings cool down nicely from the low thirties in mid afternoon, to high teens by the middle of the night. While we are in the campground, we constantly burn a mosquito coil to keep the delightful little bastards at bay. Our cunning plan for the evening is that we shut up the tent and spray fly spray into it, so that any mosquitoes that are on the inside of the tent die before we get into it to go to sleep. As fly spray is supposed to last for 30 days on any surface, we felt this, along with the mosquito nets on all the windows will give us protection from mosquitoes through out the night. I'd have to say however, that a mosquito net on all the windows is only so effective when you the tent doesn't have a sewn in
ground sheet on the floor. When we woke this morning, the massive fly on the inside of the tent suggested that any mosquitoes that took a shine to us during the night, would probably have free reign and would have no trouble finding ways into the tent via the gaps in the floor of the tent.

Tonight was our first night of 'picnic' camping. We don't have cooking facilities, but with a bottle of wine, some cheese, proscuito, olives and foccacia bread, we are able to make ourselves quite a reasonable picnic meal. The exceptionally cheap chilled red wine from the camp supermarket, seemed to have the added benefit of being virtually free of alcohol, so that by the time we'd finished the bottle, we felt as wide awake as when we'd started it.

Today we went siteseeing and cruising in the car to some little towns around Lake Maggiore. Stressa is the main town on the West side of the lake and where many of the ferries to the islands depart from. It's a pretty little town, with narrow cobblestoned streets leading away from the lake. The shops sell mainly tourist tat, with ceramics, handbags, shoes, and Murano glass to tempt the passers-by. There are lots of nice restaurants in the town and we will come back tomorrow for lunch.

We also visited Baveno, Arona and Verbania, but none of those were as pretty as Stressa. The famous sites on Lake Maggiore are the three islands – Isola Bella, Isola Pescatori and Isola Madre. We are planning to visit the first two of those tomorrow.

We had lunch at what has become our favourite haunt in Feriolo. It's a lovely little restaurant / coffee shop with a terrace restaurant on the shore of the lake. Although we are about a day away from high season, there doesn't seem to be very many tourists here at the moment and we are always able to get a seat right on the lake front, whether we are visiting for breakfast, lunch or dinner. The Italians (or the ones we've seen so far) drink Cappucino (which is very like our flat white – no chocolate or cinamon) for breakfast and then an espresso (short black) for lunch and dinner. We have started following this and are very surprised to be enjoying the short blacks as much as we are. Certainly after a lunch with Wine, the short black is light hitting the after burners and recharges you for the rest of the afternoon.

The plan for the next few days is – Isola Bella, Isola Pescatori and lunch in Stressa tomorrow, Stressa market day on Friday, followed by a visit to Villa Taranto in the afternoon, and then on Saturday we'll head down to the Riviera – South of Genoa. It's about a 3 hour drive once we've managed to pack up the tent and all our camping gear and pack it all into the car. I'll report on Sunday on how packing up the tent goes.