Pace Trento

... life I order truffles, on beef carapaccio. The first little sliver I pick up on my fork to taste alone. Distinctly nunimpressed. Utterly nondescript. Then I take some more with a piece of the rather fine beef: o belissimo! Now I understand! The closest I can come to describing it is like taking a slow draught of a fine Islay malt. It has an almost smokey flavour that seems to come alive in your mouth... exquisito!<br>

Departed Dublin around 07:30, first stop Italy for the wedding. Arrived in Malcesine for lunch. Checked into hotel Alpino, a great little spot, right in the centre of the town, chilled for a while then caught up with friends who were already settled in. <br>Weather was a bit of a mixed bag, but we still had enough sunshine to make the most of our time. We got the ferry across Lake Garda to visit Limone for the amazing invisible market and ...

... juliet. There's a statue of her underneath it and crowds of people in line to touch her boob.. apparently it's good luck... so we all took our turns touching juliet's boob and we took pictures of it. The balcony was really awesome. There's also a "tunnel of love" that you have to go through to get to the balcony. You're supposed to write your name on it. So we all wrote our names in permanent marker in the tunnel. On sunday Gaston finally made it!! We were glad he could ...

... with. Pino took care of all of us. I gave him the biggest hug out of all of them. After breakfast we brought our luggage to the lobby. I went outside and took in the view one more time and then it was time to leave. We cried so hard, we said goodbye to Manuela, the person we saw the most. We even cried when we said goodbye to the maids. Right before we left, Manuela stuck her head in the van, completely in tears and blew us all kisses. I had no ...

... partenza: ============== Prima di descrivere il viaggio due note su quanto fatto prima di partire. Non mi riferisco alle centinaia di pagine di guide, forum, diari di viaggio, ecc. ,ma ad aspetti molto più concreti: prenotazione volo, hotel e trasferimenti. Volo prenotato tramite tui.com (1300 euro per tutti e tre tasse comprese ...

... huge. We spent a few hours exploring the foreshore; some of the land holdings were very large as were many of the recreational boats; there must be old money here! Garda must be a very popular family tourist destination if the size of the caravan parks was anything to go by. Tomorrow we head for the Dolomites to get some bush-walking in the Alps and to have a Sound Of Music moment.

The first thing this morning we packed, again, then I downloaded Carols photos so far in the trip- 950 of them! My camera is malfunctioning so we only have hers for the rest of the trip. It is eating batteries, but not really-after about 2 shots said battery needs replacing and refuses to take any more pictures! Very upsetting! Our luggage is at the desk as we are out of the room but not using the car yet. We will pick it up later. There is a huge marathon ...

Saturday -Up, and down to the breakfast in the hotel, the one we didn't know about yesterday. Filled with food and walked downtown to windowshop and about 10 Maria phoned us to meet them back at the hotel. A quick trip up to our room and then off with them, first stop was the supermarket that we really enjoyed, and I bought spices for Darlene, then off to the town of Arco, close by. This is a fantastic place, as are all the old towns we have ...

... made from wheat, during the war when coffee was not available, back at the street fair - and we tried it with whip cream on top- very good. Then a long walk for a good view of the other side of the castle and headed back. GP drove us into Riva where he dropped the 3 of us off so we could look for our European FIRST cache this holiday! We walked about 1/3 mile UP and around the lake and looked for a long time and I finally spied it, a ...

... double beds that we think were actually double. You see, in Italy theres this weird idea that a double bed means two single beds pushed together - have we told you this before? Oh well you're going to hear it again.....it's the crack you see....some of us are getting very tired of it...but anyway on to other things. Some cracks are larger than others as the beds are seperated by a wooden frame. The castle had this kind of crack, it was similar ...