Hotel Domus Meiringen

Ciao Bello,

We have finally hit a day of rain...so we thought we should stop off at the nearest internet site to say hello. We have visited a few of our neighboring communities in the last few days. Varenna, which claims to be the diamond of the lake, while Bellagio is only the pearl of the lake. No George Clooney sightings. Varenna is a cute and quiet town with steep hillsides and walkways. Bellagio is also ...

... near the airport. Because we changed the plans the hotel put us in another room... a suite. They were nice enough not to charge us the usuall price for this magnificent space. Although we have to wake up at 5am, we will sleep in this luxurious suite.
Looking foward to being home and seeing our friends and family. Love, Laura

... be a 4 or 5 hr trip home. We would be falling asleep, but they were undaunted. We had a wonderful time with them speaking Italian etc. They seem very happy together and it is very good to see that. We bid them adieu with the hopes of seeing them next year.

Tomorrow we will spend our last full day in Italy, perhaps going to see the most famous villa on the lake at Balboniello (forgive me if I spelled it wrong).

Love

A and L

... br>
Sue

We transferred from the bus to a boat to do the tour of the Lake. They pointed out the particular houses of royalty and film stars - and how many millions their houses were worth. The views were spectacular, the houses really like castles, and they would have no trouble having privacy, that's for sure! Another wonderfully pleasant surprise! Some have their own cable-cars to get down to the water's edge. (Funicular)

... lemoncello on la terraza and just took it all in: bells chime from chapels from all the surrounding lake front towns, scooters zoom by, and we have to pinch each other to remind ourselves at how lucky we are to be in such a spectacular place together.

Salute!

... patio of our hotel overlooking the lake. It is in the 70's here during the day and low 60's, I think, at night. The weather is perfect. Tomorrow our friends Luca and Mary will be spending the day with us. I am not sure where or if they are staying overnight, but they will arrive between 10 and 12 and we will probably spend the day ferrying thelake and seeing a villa. I then made reservations for the four us at a lakeside place for ...

... This morning we drove through one of the highest mountain passes in the Dolomites, Passo Del Tonale. We even saw snow capped mountains. The views were extraordinary. I took lots of photos of course.
We arrived in Verena, on Lake Como, in the late afternoon and although we got a flat tire while parking, we are so happy to be ...

... stuff and some clean clothes out.

To explain: rather than take suitcases, we had packed all our clothes together in a large plastic box with a lid. Great idea, right, as when you have pitched the tent, the box just gets put into it, and all your stuff is ready and keeps dry. However, if you aren't pitching a tent, and removing the camping stuff from on top of the box, then it's almost impossible to get at your clean undies without unpacking ...

... Italian. Eventually I did return to reality, but not until after we visited Swiss Miniatur and San Salvatore. Swiss Miniatur is more or less self-explanatory, but I will say it was really cool to visit as a Swiss resident. It gave me and my friend some great ideas for future trips in the country. There are so many castles we never even knew existed! They really captured the great sites and monuments of Switzerland, including mountain ...

... Happy we walked back to the campsite.

Saturday 9th May. Today we drove up to a town called Varenna where we took the car ferry across the lake to the town of Bellagio which is very pretty perched over looking the lake and winding streets with narrow cobblestone alleys and lots of villas with garden boxes overflowing with spring flowers. The lake is backed by the alps and the ferry trip across gave us a lovely view of the snow caps. We ...