Irvea to Cremorna. July 12.

Italian hotel breakfasts are not that flash – or at least not in your 2 star joint anyway. Some sorry looking croissant things, and biscuits. But the coffee was good.
We discovered a fresh food market on our way out of town and stopped for a look around. They really like their cheese and vegetables here. We still had cheese with us, but I bought some bread and got it sliced into 4 big rolls (after quite a bit of hand signalling) and some beautiful looking strawberries (Fragole in Italian)

Now that our lunch was sorted we headed for Como, on the shores of lake ???????.

The freeways in Italian (Autostrada) have some interesting speed limits, and all seem to be under construction. The speed limit changed constantly, but no matter what the signs said everyone drove fast! The traffic heading towards Milan was very heavy, with literally hundreds of trucks. The have to stick to the right hand lane, so that lane ends up being one long lane of trucks. They are not allowed to pull out and overtake. – Quite a good idea we reckoned.

As we neared Milan the air got a lot smoggier. We skirted around the edge of Milan, and hoped that as we got closer to the mountains and Como the air would clear a bit – it didn’t!

Como is pretty, but was packed with tourists. We had lunch on the edge of the lake, and then drove around it. The road was very narrow, but quite pretty with little villages clinging to the sides of the hills. As we left the lake and headed off back down the valley in the direction of Florence we got caught in a massive traffic jam.
The roads through ____________ are very narrow and crowded. Near the approach to the Autostrada we came to came to a complete stop. 2 hours later we were through – the reason for the hold up – a truck had lost a load of huge concrete blocks on a bend and had effectively blocked the road. Originally we had hoped to spend the night in Florence. But the drive around lake Como???? - (I think it is actually called something else)had taken longer than anticipated, made worse by the traffic jam.

So Cremorna was our destination. The usual accommodation challenge ensued, but after driving through a pedestrian only area, and a lot of hand signalling we found suitable accommodation. Once again the old part of town was all cobblestone streets. Cremorna has a magnificent Cathedral and a large town square. The entire centre of town is closed to traffic in the evenings and becomes one big open air dining area.

Everyone rides bikes – not road bikes or mountain bikes, but cruising type bikes, with fat tyres and baskets. All ages and shapes rode them, and in any type of clothing from shorts and runners, to skirts and stilettos. The passing parade from our restaurant table was very interesting – but the pizzas were ordinary.