Day 13 – Friday 3 June 2016

Another fabulous breakfast at the Romantik Hotel, they really do know how to provide excellent service and a huge variety of fresh food. The fruit was extra fresh & tasty, Tereza is in fruit heaven here. We departed Grindelwald in light rain & enjoyed the delightful mountain scenery, with lots of running waterfalls & fast flowing rivers, all the way down the valley to Interlaken where we turned & followed the Brienzersee, one of the many large mountain lakes. As the valley widened more farms appeared, the grass is all so green, the snow vanished as we got lower down the valley. We started going through a lot of short to medium tunnels, around 50 to 300 metres long, then we passed through the longest tunnel, nearly 17kms under the Swiss Alps between the German speaking part & the Italian speaking part of Switzerland. On the other side there was a marked difference in the style of housing & farms. Gone were the typical Swiss wooden chalets & replaced with a more standard stone or brick building. We passed an arm of the very large Lake Maggiore before crossing the Italian border at Chiasso without any dramas, then it was a short distance to Como, on Lake Como where we stopped for lunch.

At Como we explored the large cathedral, built in the 15^th century & just a short walk from the lakeside. Inside the church is absolutely beautiful, particularly the ceilings, they are truly works of art. We enjoyed looking at all the inside of the church, they were also displaying some tapestries, some dating from the 14^th century. After lunch most of our group went on a private motor boat tour of Lake Como looking at all of the lavish houses & gardens adorning the edge of the lake. A lot of the houses also had boat houses & a few need their own funicular or lift to get up to the road & their car parking as the land is just so steep in places. We spent around about an hour on Lake Como before heading off to our overnight destination of Balveno in Italy on the western edge of Lake Maggiore.

The Grand Hotel Dino on the edge of the lake lives up to its name, it is very grand. The main lobby is stunning, with large big chandeliers everywhere, stained glass dome feature surrounded by more beautiful stained glass. Our rooms are big & very comfortable with a nice view out over the lake. Our tour, Insight certainly are being very lavish (let’s hope that it will continue this way for the rest of the trip). We had a long walk along the lake front, explored the town & then more of the hotel, (it certainly is a grand hotel in size & opulence) before changing for dinner.   Dinner in one of the main dining rooms was very pleasant with our fellow travellers, with entertainment via some very loud music from the wedding party being hosted in the next dining room. The food was typical Italian, vegetable soup or lasagne, followed by veal with potatoes & zucchini, then a gelato & fresh fruit desert, all washed down with a nice Chianti wine from the local region.

Our tour director is very knowledgeable about the places & history where we are traveling through.  So far we have no complaints. He works hard to organize things for us to experiences special things.

Piero, our coach driver’s driving skills are fantastic. Today we had to divert from the highway because of an accident. He had to drive through some backwater little town with the narrowest & most serpentine roads – how he ever got the big coach around the hair-pin turns with only centimetres to spare is hard to believe. A huge bravo to him.

So far we have been lucky with the weather – well, it did rain & was cold in France but we could still do everything, it wasn’t bad enough to stop us from carrying on with most of our activities. Some of us did make it to the top of Europe (I didn’t because of a dreadful altitude sickness) without being washed out by rain or snowed in. We had a beautiful warm 23C here, we are hoping that we will have more of today’s weather & that we will miss the terrible floods etc.

I was about to finish with this blog but on the dot at 11 pm fireworks started from the lake in front of our window (we have a million dollar view). They were fantastic, their cousin on Lake Burley Griffin is not better. It lasted for 15 minutes. We don’t know why they had the fireworks on other than to welcome Ron & Tereza to Italy. A beautiful way to end the day.