Camping in Cortina

I left the B&B early on Saturday morning and hauled myself and all my worldly goods to the bus station. I bought my ticket and the man helpfully told me which stance to go to. This turned out to be just as well, because Treviso bus station has a high-tech system of screens which announce departures, but my bus never appeared on any of them. It was easy enough to find the right place though, as it was the only stop where at least half of the passengers were wearing hiking boots.

Normally I'm not a fan of long-distance bus travel, especially on winding mountain roads, but this coach was air-conditioned and comfortable, and from my seat at the front I had a fabulous view of the increasingly stunning scenery as we wended our way up the valley. And also of the unending drama between the driver and the passengers who wanted to get off along the way. The driver seemed to have decided that some of the stops were request stops and, as we approached them, would ask, in a voice that was far too quiet to be heard at the back of the bus, if anyone wanted to get off. If there was nobody waiting at the stop, he would simply drive straight past, only to be forced to screech to a halt as somebody appeared from the rear seats desperately asking to be let off the bus. For the one lady who had understood his system, though, he chivalrously offered to drop her off outside her house in the village instead of at the official stop. Nevertheless, I was glad that Cortina was the terminus and the bus would have to stop there!

My brother picked me up in Cortina and drove us to the Camping Dolomiti, which is just out of town next to the ski jump that was built for the 1956 Olympics. My brother and his wife had already checked in, so I went to the reception to explain that I would be sharing their camping pitch for the next few days. He had very few teeth and spoke dialect, so we had a hard time understanding each other, but although standard Italian didn't seem to be in his repertoire, he spoke very good French, which helped us to get by. There was a Spanish couple next to me who were trying to find out the best place to get the wheel of their car fixed, and, despite the fact that I don't speak any Spanish, I ended up trying to interpret for them. Any hopes of a possible career change I might have had were swiftly shattered, however, as when I left the office, I heard him say to them, "So, you need to repair the wheel of your bicycle?" Living in polyglot land is fun!

The man was actually very helpful though, and the campsite was lovely. It was shady and had a swimming pool and a great view of the mountains and, best of all, really warm showers and a bar serving delicious hot chocolate, both of which turned out to be an important feature of our holiday, especially when the thunderstorms drew in at the end of the week, soaking us to the skin on the mountain top and testing my 25 euro Decathlon tent to its limits!

Camping at Lake Garda

I started my trip to Italy with a week of camping with a group of friends at the wonderful Camping Lido at Pacengo, on the shores of Lake Garda. I went there last year and this year's experience was exactly the relaxing break that I hoped it would be after a week of killer hiking in the Alps. As well as a camping space, we had booked a little bungalow which was basically a little kitchen, four bunk beds and a cupboard, all in one room, with a little terrace outside. The facilities at the campsite are fantastic, so that's pretty much everything you need. As well as the cleanest toilets and showers ever seen in a public place in Italy, there's a swimming pool and bar, a restaurant, a supermarket and a long stretch of lake shore with a pier that you can jump off for a slightly wilder swimming experience. Just along the shore is the port of Pacengo, where there's a market once a week. The port is also home to a lovely restaurant which I think is called the Casa di Giulia. There's an outdoor terrace with views over the lake, they gave us free limoncello at the end and my friend's insalata caprese was so fresh and delicious that I could smell the tomatoes as they passed my nose.

There was also a farmer's market in the town centre the Friday that we were there. At first we were a bit disappointed because it was tiny, but we went round every stall, tried everything and bought most things. At the final fruit stall, my friend L. must have charmed the stallholder because he kept pressing free fruit on us. Even after we had bought everything we wanted and more, he kept cutting slices of melon and handing them to us until we could eat no more. It was fabulous.That weekend was also the Festa dello Sport in Pacengo. In the evening there were different stalls selling local food and wines and a band playing covers of cheesy songs. Many Italians, particularly if they're of a certain age, learned to do proper ballroom dancing when they were kids, so lots of people dance the “official” steps in couples at these kinds of events. My friend J., who is also a really good dancer, was desperate for us all to join in but the rest of us Brits were too uneducated and inhibited so she found an old man to dance with instead and he was delighted with the opportunity. She, on the other hand, was quite relieved when later in the evening she convinced me to dance the uncoordinated British shuffle with her!

Camping at Lake Garda

Last Saturday afternoon at around four o'clock, I was lying on a sun lounger beside an azure blue swimming pool, drinking a mint granita, watching the thermometer fluctuate between 29 and 30 degrees and vaguely contemplating when to go for my next swim. Beside the pool, a wide avenue of perfectly pruned trees led down to the lake shore, where earlier in the day we had been relaxing on the beach, jumping off the jetty into refreshingly cold water and buying ice cream from a boat instead of a van. In real life, this is what other people do once a year on holiday. In Italy, it's what you do on any June weekend when you feel like it and you can do it less than two hours' drive from your house.

Admittedly, we were lucky. Not every campsite in Italy has lakeside pitches fenced in by box hedges where you can park a car and pitch two tents before you go off to shop at the market, eat in the restaurant, drink in the bar, or go and swim in the 25 metre pool. But the Camping Lido at Lazise does, and that was why we went there.

After our laid back day at the campsite on Saturday, we went to Sirmione on Sunday. Unfortunately, so did most of the rest of the population. Sirmione is a historical town with Roman ruins, city walls and a castle that sticks out into Lake Garda on a peninsula on the southern shore. It's a gorgeous place with a lakeside promenade, lots of little shops and the most extravagant gelaterie I've ever seen. You can't drive in the town, so after getting as far as the city walls without finding a parking space, we ended up doing a few 3 point turns in tiny car parks and parking a good half hour's walk from the old town centre. Once we were there, however, it was actually very calm. There were lots of people, but most of them, like us, were just strolling, sunbathing and swimming. Despite being slathered in sun cream for most of the weekend, I had caught a bit too much sun on Saturday, so one of the highlights for me was being able to buy a big floppy straw sunhat with a ribbon. Mr A was not particularly convinced that this was a good look, but I decided it was better than sunburn. And I can wear it wherever we end up going next weekend too...

Camping in Liguria

Mr A and I started planning our Easter holiday camping trip weeks ago, not long after we came back from skiing. We knew where we wanted to go, had decided what we needed and just needed to do one big shopping trip to buy some equipment before we left. Somehow, though, we still managed to leave in an incredible rush, with our departure punctuated by conversations like:

Me: “Do you have a towel?”
Him: “Yes. Did you remember a sleeping bag?”
Me: “Oooops! No!”

Despite the rush, though, we actually did manage to remember pretty much everything we needed and the only major problem was our bed. We had bought an inflatable mattress and a friend had lent us a battery operated pump to blow it up which had a mains adaptor and one to plug into the cigarette lighter in the car. After we had been driving for about an hour and a half, Mr A said, “Do you want to start charging the pump up now?” I reached for the box and read the instructions. “Charge the pump for eight hours before use.” Oh dear.

In our defence, I had never seen one of these pumps before and Mr A had only ever had one which could be used at the same time as it was charging, but ours was clearly marked with dire warnings about what would happen if we tried to do that. Luckily, the people at the campsite were really nice and let us use a pump of theirs. It was enormous and made a huge amount of noise but appeared to do the trick.

Unfortunately, it turned out that all our efforts were in vain because the mattress deflated in the middle of the night and we woke up at 4am lying on hard, stony ground with strange pockets of air remaining around our ears. On the second night, the same thing happened and on the third night we bought a new mattress and finally had a good night's sleep.

We stayed at the Acqua Dolce campsite in Lévanto. It was quiet, clean, had great showers and was almost entirely inhabited by Germans with camper vans and deluxe tents who obviously knew exactly how to live this kind of lifestyle and could be seen in the mornings doing housework in the camper vans and in the evenings sitting outside on folding chairs and tables with table cloths drinking wine and eating dinner. We felt a little bit out of place with our little tent and our failure to organise adequate bedding for ourselves.

Our main reason for staying in Lévanto was to visit the Cinque Terre, 5 little villages propped on the edges of towering cliffs and linked by a coastal path.

I'm a big fan of coastal paths and this was one of the best that I'd ever been on, even if they did charge us 5 euros each to walk along it. If you start at the first village, Monterosso, the walk takes about 5 hours and you can stop for ice cream, focaccia and a laze in the sun at the villages, which are no more than an hour and a half's walk away from each other. Being hardcore, however, we decided to start our walk at Lévanto, which added on an extra 2 ½ hours of walking over a very steep hill but was worth it just for the sense of achievement.

On the second day, we drove to Portovenere, which is near La Spezia, a big port, and at the tip of the Golfo dei Poeti, which gets its name from all the poets that it has inspired. Byron even has his own cave there.

We were totally lazy that day and just wandered around the village and stopped for lunch and ice cream. We ate testaroli, which is like a big pancake that you cut up and eat with sauce. Ours was with pesto, which is another Ligurian speciality.

On our last day, we went back to the Cinque Terre and took the boat between the five villages. The boat was nice, but we both agreed that we appreciated the villages more when we had to walk to get to them!