The image of holidaying on the shores of the Italian lakes is one of enduring timeless elegance. Beautiful turquoise waters surrounded by perfectly quaint and unassuming villages lost in time. Supposedly Lake Como is the real go-to destination for the glitterati and A-listers, but I’m not sure that’s really our scene. So instead we head for the often overlooked Lake Garda. This is the largest lake in Italy, so large that it actually sprawls across three of the countries regions. It’s shores are home to countless scattered medieval villages offering the best scenery and produce Italy has to offer. Another massive selling point of this lake is the weather. The specific topography of the lake being surrounded on all sides by mountains affords this area a similar climate to that found in the south of the country as the colder winds from the north are kept at bay. When we arrive the mercury is touching 26 degrees and there isn’t a cloud in sight.

As the lake is so huge, we don’t really know where to head for, so I plump for a campsite in Sirmione at the bottom of the lake. The town looks amazing and is apparently amongst the most popular for visitors. A quick phone call before we leave Venice confirms that they have plenty of space and there’s no need to reserve a pitch, so we slowly make our way across the country, having lunch and visiting a supermarket on the way. We arrive at the campsite in late afternoon, ready to check in and enjoy our lakeside view. However, the camping gods have a different plan for us today. It looks like the person I spoke to in the morning has slightly over estimated the amount of space available and we are turned away having missed the last available pitch by a paltry five minutes. After frantically phoning around every campsite in the immediate vicinity and finding they are all full for the night as well, we find a site 10 miles further up the western shore has availability, so off we go. Nothing moves too quickly around here, especially the traffic. 40 minutes later we arrive at Camping Zocco, a charming, family owned lakeside campsite set amongst a terraced olive grove with its own private access to the lake. After squeezing Discorama in between two olive trees, I bust out the BBQ and we settle in for a night of steak, sausages and beers. 

As a side note here, it’s worth noting that some swimming pools in this part of the world require you to wear a swimming cap, this being one of them. Luckily the shop on site sells them. Unluckily that meant having to attempt to squeeze my dreadlocks into one!

The next day, after our usual morning stint of maths and English, we want to experience the enticing waters of the lake for ourselves. As it’s now fairly late in the season, the closest water sports hut has closed its shutters for the year, but apparently there is one a few miles away on the beach in Manerbe. I ask the owner of the campsite if she can order me a taxi, and she kindly obliges. After 15 minutes two very smartly gentlemen turn up in a blacked out Mercedes Vito van and whisk us away towards our destination. It seems that there are no taxi firms here, there are just private transfer drivers catering for the normally well heeled visitors. They eventually navigate us to a point fairly close to our destination after much discussion between themselves about where exactly it is that we are going. The distinct lack of civilisation in this particular area prompted me to ask whether they might be available later to take us back, in case we cannot find another taxi locally (Uber has definitely not yet made it to the shores of Lake Garda!). Another few minutes of what appears to be heated discussion between themselves in Italian yields the answer that they are unfortunately busy later, but they furnish me with the number of their “colleague” Samuele who should be available to help us later on. We may need to ring him several times they warn us, as Samuele can sometimes be hard to get hold of! 

Happy enough, we head off towards the beach. It’s lunchtime at this point, so we stop in at the only restaurant within a mile of the beach. It’s a typically laid back Italian affair consisting of a large elegant dining area and a beautiful garden with views directly onto the Lake through the leaves of its many olive trees. There are barely any customers, and it seems to be a husband and wife affair. When we have ordered our food, we sit and wait enjoying the view. The chorus of raised voices and crashing pans coming from what is presumably the kitchen suggests that our food order is potentially the topic of much conversation in the kitchen. Perhaps we have disturbed their quiet afternoon? However, when the food arrives we are presented with three beautiful plates of home-cooked pasta, and a sandwich stuffed with delicious local salami and smoked cheese. It was perfect. We pay our bill, thank our hosts for the meal and head off to the beach.

The beaches here are stone beaches, which my wife loves as it doesn’t create the ensuing mess a sand beach does. It does, however, make it harder when wading into the water with children, as you try not to fall head over heels on the slippery green boulders. We hire a pair of stand-up-paddle boards from the beach hut and take to the water. Hunter is immediately brilliant, as he normally is with most sports. I take slightly longer to get used to it, as I have increasingly creakier bones to deal with these days. But I am soon moving along just fine (knees only though) with Bam as my passenger. Hunter and I take turns to ferry Kate and Bam about on the water, and it is quite simply glorious on this lake. The water is so clear that you can see the bottom at over 2 metres of depth, and it is warm, as warm as any swimming pool I have been in out here. The chap in the rental office informed me that it was about 25 degrees in the water. If we had water this warm in the UK, I would be in it all the time. We might even occasionally see Kate in it! It seems so much more appealing than wearing a 6mm wetsuit and still becoming blue around the lips in the sea off Bournemouth beach at this time of year.

When we have finished our SUP session we all have a bit of a swim and the kids play on the beach while I try to arrange a taxi home. I ask the rental guy and they give me a number. On phoning them and waiting on hold for 10 minutes they finally inform me there are no cars available. So I turn to Google myself and proceed to ring every local taxi firm I can find, only to be greeted with the same response. This was my fear earlier when we arrived, so I look for the number for Samuele, as recommended by our earlier drivers. As previously instructed I start to phone Samuele several times. Over and over again I ring, and on about the 10th call he finally answers, and what followed was what I presume to be a tirade of abuse directed at the fact that I had repeatedly disturbed him. The only word I recognised was “merda”, and he used it a fair few times!

Confronted with this turn of events we resigned ourselves to the fact that we would probably have to walk the 3 miles home, with two fairly weary children in tow, what joy. As a last ditch effort we thought we might pop back into the restaurant where we had lunch earlier and ask if they had any local taxi numbers. So we scooped up the kids and trudged off back up the hill towards the restaurant. The place was completely deserted when we arrived. When we made ourselves known, the lady who had served us earlier popped up from behind the counter, I believe we may have woken her. We explained our predicament, and she told us we would never get a taxi and it would be too expensive anyway. She then continued to say that she would take us home in her car. She told her husband and ushered us out the back door into her car. What a lovely thing to do. She then chatted with us for the next 10 minutes all the way to our campsite about where we had been and where we were going. She refused to take any payment, she was simply glad to help, and also happy that we were having a lovely time in the area she was obviously fiercely proud of. She really made my day!

We finished our day with a nice long swim (hat included) in the Zocco swimming pool, followed by a BBQ dinner and off to bed. School in the morning, followed by the drive to Florence, with a rather exciting pit stop on the way in a little place called Modena, but more about that in the next post!