Flashback Friday Travel Photo Memories – 4 – Lake Garda

Lake Garda is something of a Mecca for sailors – every class wants a regatta here to see what it is all about.  We’ve now been twice – probably enough sailing in my book, but I’d love to go back for a holiday (in fact there is an SLH property in a stunning location that I have my eye on…)!!

Riva del Garda – July 2006 RS Eurocup

Here is a photo of Mr P bimbling the boat – the other girl in his life!  It was always best that I didn’t get too involved in this, tending to instead ensure he had tea and that I had caught up with friends!  We drove down to Garda from the UK – it has to be done once (although we’ve done it twice), doesn’t take that long (20-30 hours) and saves a lot of money, especially if you have a company car and fuel card!  It is a great drive and we went out a few days earlier than necessary to take a more scenic route which included seeing the ski jump in Innsbruck, trying out the no-speed-limit Autoroute in Germany and seeing how embarrassingly cheap fuel is in Luxemboug (although there are no petrol stations anywhere near the boarder so we had no air con or radio by the time we finally crossed into Lux and could buy some fuel, having cut it a bit fine!).

The funniest bit of the trip was I think in Switzerland – the Swiss had built a new tunnel through a mountain, blocked the old one and not changed the road signs.  Of course – we were driving on sat nav and print outs of google maps or whatever the go to mapping website was 8 years ago.  Thankfully we had a map with us too so managed to work out what was going on, many didn’t – it was a common discussion topic in the bar on the first evening!

So from Riva del Garda, the racing is always on the afternoon breeze – the Ora. It arrives at lunchtime and the wind goes from nothing to 25 knots in a matter of moments.  And the air is warm, like a hair dryer – so compared to the feel of 25kts in the UK it is very different.  Sometimes there are nasty storms that come over the mountains, these are nasty and fierce.  We spent a lot of time sitting on the bottom of the boat having capsized it to sit out the storm.  To say that I didn’t enjoy that experience is something of an understatement!

One thing I did really enjoy however was going to the Occa bar each evening – creatures of habit that we are, this is where the whole fleet (maybe 200 english sailors) would congregate every evening after dinner and into the early hours!  They serve all manner of drinks, although I think I’ve only even seen 2 being served here – the mojito (predominantly mint leaves in a glass doused with strong rum) and the cuba libre (rum and coke).

The drive home is tougher – its the end of the holiday and 24 odd hours on the road as you head back towards work is far less exciting!!  But it didn’t put us off as we went back 2 years later!