We awoke around 0700 and after a cup of tea got moving to take down the tent and pack the car and this was completed by around 0830 then time for a shower and breakfast before leaving the site at about 0930.
Back through the mass of designer label outlets and on to the Autostrade heading North to Bologne. A quick top of fuel at a mere 90 euros, wow fuel is still expensive, and the amount of trucks on the road was amazing and hardly enough space to put the cars on. We then entered a stretch of road for about eighty miles where you keep going in to and out of tunnels of varying length and tasking off and putting sunglasses back on was getting tedious. At one point we were overtaking a line of trucks when this German car towing a caravan pulled out about fifty yards in front of us and then the wind from the truck he was passing made his caravan slew all over the place and so we braked hard just in case it turned over and when he had slowed down sufficiently he then returned to the inner lane, that really must have scared him and as it scared us.
Just South of Milan we stopped at a petrol service station for a light lunch before tackling the Milan traffic on their equivalent of the M25. Now we had a good map this was much easier than expected and the traffic was lighter perhaps due to it being lunch time and everybody had stopped to eat some pasta or a McDonalds or something.
We needed to do some shopping and came across a Lidle store which when we entered looked more like a war zone and so we beat a hasty retreat and came across a COIN food store in a lovely place called Verbania and as it only about 20 kilometres from our proposed campsite in a town further up the lake called Cannobio we shall certainly return here in the next day or two.
The first camp site we came to was called Camping La Romantica but unfortunately we had failed to notice that this place closed in three days’ time and so as we needed four nights we went to their sister camp site on Lake Maggiore. By now it was almost 5pm but we walked the site and located a place with a view of the Lake and set up the tent and this time the ground was soft and enabled us to use regular pegs.
A light dinner almost in the dark followed by a brief walk along the lakeshore and the amount of lights around the lake was amazing, it must have been great in earlier times with hardly anybody living here.
