Como

Leaving Verona was a little bittersweet but we'd heard such wonderful things about the Lake Como area that we were pretty excited to go. The lake itself is just beautiful, surrounded on all sides by these wonderfully lush mountains with more species of trees than I have ever seen in one place. I couldn't even begin to count how many there are!

We stayed at Hotel Larius in Como. That morning I had looked back in my guidebook about the town of Como and one of the first things I saw was, "Not the best place to stay as is an industrial town." That didn't really make us feel a lot better about where we were staying, and to be honest, it was quite accurate. There's nothing attractive about the town and the place where we stayed made me think of some very questionable neighborhoods in NYC. We even asked the manager if it was safe to walk around. Apparently it was.

The first thing we decided to do was to turn in our car and save some money by training it from Como to the Cinque Terre, so we headed to Avis. Come to find out we'd rented the car for 5 days and, although they told John he could turn it in whenever, the fee was incredible. However, we were still saving about 400 E by doing this so we did it.

We found out that Como has a beach so we paid 19E to go and lay on it. The first thing you notice is that it's not really a "beach" like ours - more of gravel and it was roped off from the water, which was really dirty and uninviting anyway. But it was a place to lay out and relax, away from the massive crowd of people up from us in the small pool. John finally got too hot and went to get in. When he came back he said that everyone was wearing swim caps that was in the water.....we found out later that this is not necessarily required but highly suggested to keep an eye on people in the water. Interesting.

The next day we took a ferry boat ride (about 2.5 hours) over the Lake and that was really wonderful. We took it all the way down to Belaggio (pronounced Beh-LAH-joe) and walked around and had lunch. Very cute little town on the hillside! We decided to head back on the fast boat which is a hydro-planing boat that took about 45 minutes with stops along the way. It was a really fun afternoon.


This is a great shot because of the hair!! :>)

John was having some trouble reserving us tickets online for the train the next day so we decided to walk the 20+ minutes to the train station and get them that evening. After walking there and standing in a very slow moving line for about 20 minutes, we found out that the trains were all striking the next day. I thought John was going to have an aneurysm. Of course Avis had already shut down for the evening so there was no way to see if a car was even available for us the next day to head to the Cinque Terre and we really didn't like Como enough to want to stay there another night.

Not much to be done about it though, so we headed to bed. I didn't mention this earlier but from midnight to 6 a.m. the a/c shuts down in the hotel. We found that out the first night after both of us waking around 3 a.m. burning SLAP up. John called the front desk and the guy thought something was wrong with the whole system. Thankfully he had a fan which we took. By the next morning it was working fine. When we mentioned this to the manager wondering what had happened she informed us that they have to do it because the noise from the a/c unit is too loud for the neighborhood. Lovely, right? So armed with Ambien (John) and the fan, we fell asleep.

Thankfully we got a car from Avis first thing the next day and we headed out ASAP.