Our second trip in 2023 to Europe started on July 24 and ended on September 20. We flew from Vancouver to Paris, to pick up our lease car and then to head towards Switzerland. This was supposed to be a leisurely transit, driving less than 200 km on the first day, as I do not consider it wise to drive a long distance right after a long overnight flight with potentially no shut-eye. The next day we were supposed to drive the rest of the distance to our son's place in Lenzburg/Switzerland and the following day head into Italy to the house we rented at Lake Garda.
Even though I should have known better, unfortunately I made a major error in planning this route, not taking into consideration that we were to transit the Swiss Alps on a Saturday in late July - an absolute no-go if it at all can be avoided. The reason: During these summer weekends, a very high traffic volume crosses these narrow alpine tunnels and mountain passes, resulting in mega wait times that sometimes can last a good number of hours. Since our flights were already booked and rebooking them would be difficult and costly, we had to accelerate our drive upon arrival in Paris: Instead of the less than 200 km planned, we drove almost 400 km to Vesoul, a place fairly close to the Swiss border and then the next day dashed, with a very early morning start, to the home of our son in Lenzburg, unloaded some of our luggage, had breakfast and headed straight for the alpine Gotthard Tunnel, which we reached around noon on Friday and luckily only had to wait about one and a half hours to enter the tunnel portal. Later that afternoon we made it to the home of one of my former classmates in the southern Swiss canton of Ticino and enjoyed a wonderful time with our friends, far away from the worries of crossing the tunnel and in closer proximity to our destination for the next week at Lake Garda.
The above information is not really essential for the images I show in this post, but I considered it interesting to demonstrate that even the best-laid plans can run afoul, often on small details and that, even though we are well-seasoned travelers, we are certainly not immune from these occurrences.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Our 2023 Summer Trip covered a route I labeled the "Eastern Alps Tour". I had planned this drive for about the last 10 years already and it was postponed, rearranged and altered a number of times due to circumstances beyond my control. - Actually I have to admit that we still did not achieve the entire coverage I had carefully researched: The original route included a further extension into Northern Slovenia, then up to Graz and Klagenfurt in Austria, before moving south to Bled and then following the route that we eventually achieved (see the second map appended below). While we were underway and staying on the Istrian Peninsula in Rovinj, we realized from the long-range weather forecast that an extensive bad weather front was heading our way and we had to truncate the expected route so as to cover the main places we wanted to see before this front was hitting us.
Again, I want to remind the viewers that this is only an interim album, with a very short selection of images out of about 10,000 I took on this trip and the future complete albums will show much more details. Even at that, the Interim Albums I have recently loaded onto my website present a slightly wider selection than what I am able to post here at this time.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The images I am posting today cover the first segment of this tour. We rented a house in Toscolano-Maderno near the shore of Lake Garda with the families of our two children and had a wonderful, relaxing time at this place. It was an extremely hot week with temperatures close to 40C / 100F, but luckily the house came with a nice pool which was great for the adults and particularly for the children. We managed to do a number of local drives, sometimes just Susan and I, sometimes with the families, to different towns around the lake, as well as a few boat rides on the lake to places like Torri del Benaco and to Sirmione.
Lake Garda is Italy's largest body of non-salt water, though there are a number of similarly situated, nearby longish lakes stretching into the southern alpine landscape, such as (from east to west) Lago d'Iseo, Lago di Como, Lago di Lugano and Lago Maggiore, the latter two shared with Switzerland. The history of the settlements around the lake reaches back to Roman times and there is not sufficient space here for me to delve further into the area's interesting history. If you are interested, the following link to an article in Wikipedia can provide you further information:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_GardaNotes
TRIP INFO: Set # 1 provides a brief introduction to this series. Please use the link below if you would like to review this intro:
https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-797460-1.htmlEARLIER POSTS of this series: Access my topic list at UHH, the new posts are listed in reverse chronological order:
https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/user-topic-list?usernum=45105Thanks for visiting, I recommend viewing the downloads and look forward to your comments and questions.
.
Our second trip in 2023 to Europe started on July ... (
