We boarded and left more or less on time, and arrived 15 minutes early - almost 9am local time, which is 8am at home. Again, there were few queues at Venice Marco Polo, but of course we had to join a 3rd country queue rather than the EU queue, which didn’t exist anyway. With an EU passport, you just walked straight through.
We were met by a driver and 6 of us got into a minibus and drove along a rather dull motorway for about 90 minutes to Verona airport, where we picked up a couple from Scotland. The drive to Molveno was another 90 minutes, though it was a rather more interesting drive. The countryside was flat at first, but we soon approached the mountains.
I’m afraid this is a poor photo, taken from the minibus which was travelling at speed, but it gives an idea of the countryside.
The valley floor is flat and the bare rocky cliffs hang over it. The valley floor is almost completely covered with vineyards. I noticed a few olive trees as well, but not many.
We left the motorway and joined a local road, then we started to wind up the mountain on a road with the most amazing hairpin bends. Our driver tacked these at a far greater speed than I would have done, and I had the feeling he would have gone even faster had it not been for the car in front of us, the road being too narrow for passing. There was, sadly, no view, the road winding through quite a thick forest of what looked like pine trees,
Eventually we reached the highest extent of the road, after lots of ear popping, and drove through a couple of ski resorts. The houses were definitely of the alpine type but I couldn’t see anything that looked even vaguely like a piste, so perhaps they were even higher up. I did see a cable car and it was working, so presumably carrying walkers.
Finally, around 1pm, we drove into Molveno and found our hotel. Although it was lunch time, we were too tired to do anything except fall on the bed, having had little sleep the previous night. Later we woke up and walked down the hill to admire the beautiful Lake Molveno.
The lake is beautiful, surrounded by the hills and jagged peaks. The hills and peaks are obviously good for parasailing; on the top right of my photo you might be able to see one person coming down over the lake, but there were several others.
The lake must be at least partly artificial because there are information boards showing how it was partly drained some years ago in order to facilitate repairs to the hydroelectric power station.
People were swimming and canoeing in the lake and in another area there were lots of boats.
You can see just how jagged and rocky some of the peaks are.
It was quite a long steep walk down to the lake, but fortunately we found a shorter way back to the hotel. After dinner, we looked at the garden and and saw there was an even quicker way down to the lake for the bottom of the garden, but I’m not sure how usable it is. Paul and I had gone looking for the garden earlier, and found the only door to it was locked.
We are half board here, and the delicious dinner had rather more courses than we are used to eating! This is the view from our hotel balcony.
Even though this was taken about 7 at night, the weather looks a bit grim, and it looks as if it rained a bit while we were eating dinner. But apparently it is to be hot tomorrow, and we are taking a funicular up the mountain and visiting a winery later.
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