The Road to Italy

Our first trip out of Munich came quick! I need to be in Nice, France Monday through Wednesday next week for work, so we decided the whole family would go and make it a vacation too. Thursday is a holiday and I took Friday off, so it ends up a week-long trip just before the kids start school!

We left our hotel in Munich about 10AM and headed south (via a westward loop around Munich) toward the lakes of northern Italy. John got us a hotel in Como, Italy which is a beautiful town *on the side of a mountain*. The drive to get here took us about 5-6 hours total, but we did stop for lunch somewhere in Switzerland (or Austria, or Liechtenstein, we're not really sure). When we walked in there (after trying and failing to find any other place with food), and asked if the person that greeted us spoke English, she said, "No," and then I think she really wanted us to leave! But we pressed on and actually had a quite tasty (although expensive) lunch! I had salami pizza (again) and we also ordered spaghetti (again). Those are getting to be some good standard choices for us!

The drive from Munich to Como was beautiful. Honestly, for all my photographer friends - every single minute of the trip looked like it belonged on a postcard. It would be a feast for a landscape photographer! With our phones and a moving car, we can't do it justice, but here is what we got:

There were a whole bunch of tunnels. I don't know why I would have expected that, but I certainly didn't. It was fun - we starting counting the seconds we were in the long ones. I don't think I've ever been in tunnels that long before - especially not through mountains!

 This was a bridge not too far out of Munich. I just thought it looked cool - it wasn't especially long or big or anything, just interesting.

This was as we got into the Alps. Wow - it was amazing how we were driving and then all of the sudden, the mountains are HUGE right in front of us. We decided that when we have driven to Colorado in the past, the mountains kind of build up for a while before you get to the peaks, so by the time you see the tops, you're halfway up from sea level already. We decided that's why the contrast here seemed to be so great. We were at sea level (or Munich level) and then we were in the foothills all-of-the-sudden. It was breathtakingly beautiful.

In the first picture below, you can see the blue-ish mountains off in the distance:

Then BAM! You're suddenly right next to them!

This picture was taken from our table at lunch somewhere in Austria, Lichtenstein or (we think) Switzerland. The countries are all really close and it's hard to tell where we were. We tried to figure it out when we got to the hotel with internet, but we couldn't figure it out.

After lunch, we got back on the road. We saw quite a few waterfalls, but this one is the best one we caught on camera. It was pretty high up and it fell pretty far which made it cool. Again, the picture doesn't do it justice at all.

This is just another scene as we got closer to Italy. We were going down the other side of the Alps by this point.

When we got to Lake Como, and then the city of Como, I started to see the more stereotypical streets of Italy - very narrow and very steep! As we left the city of Como to go up the mountain beside the lake to our hotel, I *really* experienced those roads. Honestly, I was terrified at the narrow roadways, sharp, hairpin turns and the fact that we're in an SUV didn't help either. By the time we got to the hotel, I was DONE! 

Then we walk in and the guy at the reception tells us that he's overbooked the hotel, but he's arranged for us to be in another hotel just up the mountain. We had barely made it into a parking place at that hotel, but John managed to get out of it and follow his Vespa up the mountain. The place we ended up is certainly "normal" European (read: small), but it's nice enough. The young girl at the front has been BY FAR the nicest person we've come in contact with so far in Italy, so it's not a total loss. The mountain faces the west, so the setting sun this afternoon was sweltering and the restaurant where we decided we wanted to have dinner apparently closes before 6:30 on Saturday nights, so we ended up on the roof of our own hotel, with the sweet little girl from the front bringing us dinner & beer. It ended up wonderful, but it was dicey there for a while. Now we're trying to go to sleep with the windows open (so it cools off - and we've done this every night in Germany) with a very busy street outside the hotel - lots of motorcycles & people...It's just nuts!

We'll leave here in the morning and head the remaining 4 hours or so to Nice. I think it's funny that we'll be in Nice as long as we were in Munich before we left for our vacation!

We'll post more as we can - roaming (outside of Germany) mobile data is crazy expensive, so we have to depend on hotel Wifi for Facebook updates during the day. We'll update some in Nice from the hotel as well.

Au revoir!