Farnsniente

Lake Garda

A Nordic view on an Italian lake

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in
📍 Malcesine, Italy

Photos

Trip index

Summary

Leaving Bellagio we took a gorgeous drive down the other side of the peninsula with views of the Lecco Arm of Lake Como and the Orobie Alps on the opposite side. They’re very tall and dramatic but it was too hazy for good photos. Off to Malcesine on Lake Garda. An incredible drive along the lake followed by some up and up an extremely windy, narrow road on the eastern side. Our excellent hotel had beautiful views from everywhere. I enjoyed a desperately needed massage and then we both hung out at the lovely pool and on our balcony before dinner al fresco with live music.

Details

Again today we’re up quite early. We cook and eat our last breakfast with our nice full kitchen. We pack, clean the dishes and take out the trash. 

With half our luggage we hike to our car. I drive the car kind of close-ish to our apartment and put on the flashers in a loading zone. I make sure I don’t have to again drive through the hoards of people to get out of here. We quickly fetch our other luggage, drop off our room keys and wave goodbye. We’ll miss the apartment, the A/C, the surrounding beauty. We won’t miss the crowds.  

I point the car out of town. To our left are striking, tall (hazy) mountains across the water. We drove up the west “leg” and are now leaving down the east leg. Here too, it’s very pretty. The road is quite narrow and there’s very few business (if any) or houses. It’s two way which is a bit crazy for how narrow the road is. With all the new, fancy, wide cars, the wide trucks and the occasional group of bikes, it’s scary. There are lots of tunnels.

At one point we’re scrunched between an oncoming gas truck and some foliage on the side of the road. I fear I got a bit too close to the hedge. I think Hertz will want some euros for the light scratches on the passenger side of the car. Bummer. 

We have three and a half hours of driving today, hopefully not all like this. Today may be our longest drive of the trip. We’re relocating from Lake Como to Lake Garda. Will there be any difference? We’ll find out. 

Soon we’re on the Autostrada, ah, nice. Three lanes. The slow lane is mostly big trucks. The fast lane is where the cars are passing. Which makes the middle lane the default. Cars are returning to the middle lane after passing and the trucks are coming into the middle lane to pass another big truck. It makes for exciting driving. You have to stay on your toes.

Our Ford Kuga has many nice features, plus “lane assist control”, or some such thing. It nudges me back into the center of my lane whenever it thinks I’ve strayed too far. I think it’s too aggressive and so have turned it off. The result is the car periodically “yelling” at me (well, displaying a message and beeping) saying I’m obviously tired and need to take a nap, er break. Grumpy old men don’t take that well from stupid automotive robots. 

After two hours of impeccable driving, we do stop for a pee break and a coffee. Unlike the French autoroute stops (with their futuristic automated coffee machines), here it’s still old school: humans, and lots of them. The Italians are obviously very serious about their coffee.

The auto stop would also like you to buy lots of other things. For the kids there’s lots of temptation. There’s cookies, one single sleeve of round cookies in a meter-long box. For lollipops there’s a bouquet of lots of them (designed to look like flowers) or one huge lollipop-looking package that is actually a container of lots of normal sized suckers. There’s pasta, wine, limoncello, and on and on. We spend more time in here than we should. 

Our place for the night is in Malcesine. It’s 3/4s of the way up the east side of Lake Garda. To get there we drive along the lake most of the way. It’s naturally beautiful and unlike the last two lakes doesn’t have sprawling villas with huge gardens everywhere. They also don’t have an armada of rusty ferries belching black smoke hauling day-trippers who are never happy with where they are. This is my preference. 

The foreign tourists are seemingly all local from other parts of Italy or from nearby countries. They like nature, exercise, and relaxation, a far cry from what we saw in Bellagio and Stresa. Give me this any day. We do see a modern gondola which takes people way up to the top of a nearby Mount Baldo. Many of the gondola passengers are carrying their paraglider chutes for the flight down. The updrafts must be amazing as we see many Icarus wannabes way overhead. 

Our hotel is halfway up the same mountain served by the gondola. There’s a midway station about a km walk from our hotel. Hm. GPS offers three routes up to the hotel. The fastest route is the suggested route which we take. Big mistake. It’s a narrow, steep one lane, two way road. As is custom we have right-of-way since we’re going uphill. 

We meet many cars, trucks and a motorbike. Each time, the oncoming vehicle has to back up and then head in to a driveway (temporarily). When one truck does this, another car coming down suddenly shows up. I am now forced to back up and head into another driveway to try to solve this impasse. 

At our hotel we ask about this. “Ah, you must have used GPS” the girl laughs. “Yes, no, go this other route with wider lanes… it’s longer but faster”. Whew (thanks, GPS). 

We can instantly tell the view from our hotel is breathtaking. From our hotel, the restaurant, bar, our room, the pool, etc. We’re given some printed information, including massage options. Karen’s eyes light up. We’ve stuck to our trip budget (mostly) so she signs up for a rub down. 

While she’s off getting rubbed the right way, I hang out in our room, finishing the day’s blog entry. After her rubdown we spend some time by (and in) the pool. Ahhh. 

At dinnertime we head back downstairs, in proper attire. There’s a band (a lady singing and playing guitar and a guy on bass cello). They’re quite good performing good lounge music at a very acceptable volume. Dinner is quite good and we are careful not to over-order (OK, well on the food, anyway). 

Post-dinner we hangout on the terrace, with the big blue sky overhead, the broad view of the lake below us, and the mountains in the middle. It’s past sunset and the sky is darkening, ever so slowly. One by one lights come on in the hilltop communities across the water. They’re all high atop glacier carved cliffs. It’s a most pleasant view.

Photos

Another delightful Karen-prepared omelette with cherry tomatoes, provolone, sautéed peppers and onions. I should marry this girl!
For how early it is, we’re thinking we won’t encounter too much traffic here in the old town. But, apparently this is the time all of the business people come to deliver goods and repair equipment.
Speaking of crowded, on the drive down the eastern leg of the lake, the road is unreasonably narrow for all of the trucks, bikes, cars and motorcycles. I get a bit too close to the edge at one point and think I’ll hear about it from my friends at Hertz.
At the Autoroute rest stop we see what a good coffee-loving country like Italy does to keep their drivers well caffeinated.
Sugar, too, appears to be part of the equation. Chupa Cups seem to be the lollipop of choice around here. They prefer to sell you a large number all at once and so form them into huge bouquets of pops, or re-package them into (what seems to be) one single ridiculously-large pop. We’re able to resist both.
Karen does consider the leaning towers of chocolate bars.
We also resist their burger restaurant, which is themed like the Old Wild West of the U. S. of A. I guess us Americans are supposed to feel right at home.
Eventually we’re driving up the eastern edge of Lake Garda. We remark about how natural and pretty it is. I think we’ve found our lake.
At lunch we stop in at the Spiaggio d’Oro for a bite to eat. Speaking of bites, at our table is this game, I guess it’s there to help pass the time while we wait for our food. Each player in turn pushes down one of the alligators teeth. At some unknown point enough teeth have been pushed down to where Ally (I just named him that) bites down on your finger. We played it a couple of times and laughed and laughed at the poor person whose finger got chomped.
The beer I was drinking may have helped with the laughter. Classy place: my beer came in a glass boot.
What we were not expecting is how gorgeous the view is from our hotel, our room, etc. etc. This will do, yes-sirree-bob!
Looking down is fun, but so is looking up. Way (way) above us (center) is the top of the cable car. We’ve seen a lot of funiculars and cable cars, but man, this one goes really high. We didn’t take it (you have to save something for next time) but Karen tells me the cable car rotates as it’s going up. Hopefully it’s supposed to do that.
Glaciers did a great job of carving out this lake however-many-millions of years ago. The far (western) side is very steep cliffs. There are communities above the cliffs. I don’t think they get down to the water without driving a long distance.
An ongoing fun exercise is watching the paragliders coming down. (There is one in this picture). With the updrafts, they don’t come down very quickly, if at all, until they’re ready. We see them over the lake (or perhaps over the land on the other side of the lake) but when we look straight up, way up high, we see even more paragliders. They really get up there.
If we tire of our room, or the bar, or whatever, we can head for the pool, or sit on a chair on the grass. Here Karen’s leading me down to the pool.
The pool has quite the view, too, and the water temperature is just fine. I got all the way in. Very refreshing.
Cleaned up, we head to dinner. The guitar and bass cello players were great, also with singing.
The napkins, in their napkin rings, stretched the entire width (length?) of the table. I’m excited, thinking I could probably actually do this napkin fold (er roll).
Delicious food. Pork and fish. Good local wine, too.
The sun went down during dinner, putting on quite the show.
After a long while, the darkness caught up with the sunset and the lights across the water started coming on.