Lake Garda is the biggest lake in Italy and, after Majorca, probably the biggest vacation destination for German holidaymakers. Which is saying a lot, actually, because -- while large, see supra -- and if my stated statistic is actually true (which it may very well be), the lake takes up only around 370 square kilometres and there are a lot of Germans out there. Nestled into the Italian Alps, touching three different Italian regions, it boasts a Mediterranean climate, beautiful surrounding villages bursting with Italian culture, and a geographic proximity such that one can arrive at the northern part of the lake from the Munich city centre in about four and a half hours (much less if you drive as fast as the Germans do).
After somehow surviving at least a handful of lockdowns, complete with school closures, extreme cold, rainy and generally soggy weather, and thus extreme sequestration within our 80 square meters of living space for something like 365 days (plus or minus), it was high time for a vacation. Pemulis donned a certified FFP2 mask and braved the potentially unvaccinated masses on the U2 as he made his way (only third time on the underground in the last year I believe) to the Europcar kiosk at the local train station to collect a very fancy Volvo SUV. He signed away more of his paycheque to secure all manner of (allegedly) required insurances and upgrades and keyed in his home address to the onboard GPS. Later, and as usual, following something that felt like 6 months but was probably closer to around 3 hours, the car was painfully slowly loaded up and finally the family was off! Italy bound at last.
While the Covid-19 "situation" has been improving a lot around these parts as of late, things are still definitely not back to completely normal. As such, there are a number of procedures in place for if and when one so chooses to travel around. For example, when you enter Italy, you need a negative Covid test result from within the last 48 hours for everyone in the car. You also need to fill out a pre-entry clearance form with information on where and when you will enter the country, who is all with you, and where you've been on your journey, and you need to print out this form and carry it with you (who has a printer these days?). If you travel through another country on the way there, you don't need to fill out a pre-entry clearance form for that country, but if you stay in that country at all (other than simply passing through, I mean), you do. So, normally, we wouldn't have to do all this for the required trip through Austria on the way to Italy. But, since the Pemulis family includes two small children, one of whom very stereotypically started asking "are we there yet" about 10 minutes into the journey, and went on to ask said question approximately seven hundred more times before arrival, we decided (ahead of time, of course) to spend the night in Austria on the way there, and therefore had to do the whole procedure for Austria as well.
[Inline footnote: Helga is an "expat kid", I guess you would say. While we speak English at home and with most of our friends, she interacts with other kids either in German or in French. When she watches TV she watches it in German. Neither Pemulis nor Joelle has ever, at least in her presence, asked the "are we there yet?" question and she has never been on a trip with other kids somewhere further than maybe a 15 minute ride. My conclusion is that asking the specific question "are we there yet?" over and over and over ad nauseum is an example of nature, rather than nurture.]
Now, after getting Corona tests all around, collecting the results, planning the route, finding the border crossings for Austria and Italy and the estimated crossing times for each of those borders and filling out personal details such as passport number, place of birth, and known contacts within the last 2 weeks, finding a printer, and realizing that Heinrich's resident card is expired (a bridge we will hopefully cross safely at some point in the near future) we were good to go. Of course, no one at either border ever asked for any of this documentation, and it just sat untouched in my bag for the duration of the vacation. However, having spent nearly 8 years living amongst the Germans, we felt good knowing that we had followed the rules.
The en-route night in Austria was fairly uneventful and by Thursday at lunchtime we had reached the promised land of Lake Garda. Many popular tourist destinations, though surely popular for some reason, never come close to living up to expectations. They are always touristy (imagine!) and never quite as nice as you hoped they would be. Lago di Garda, however, was something else: the natural beauty actually surpassed my expectations. The snow-capped mountains that raise straight from sea level at the lake way up to 2000 metres and beyond are breathtaking. The lake is not only naturally majestic but the towns are so old-world Italy and the climate -- even though the daily highs are not so different from Munich -- so Mediterranean in how it feels and the atmosphere is just really, really nice.
Our hotel was on a small street just off the main road running north-south that hugs the west side of the lake. We stayed just outside of the town of Limone -- home (or perhaps just vacation place) of the rich and beautiful. The hotel had a big swimming pool, a view of the lake, and a 2-minute walk to a beach where we spent some apéro evenings while the kids dug stones and made "soup". Joelle and I each had a chance to do a solo trail "run" (quotation marks because the inclines of the mountains here are so steep that one cannot run) in the surrounding mountains which was really nice but would naturally have been nicer had we been able to do so together. We ventured into Limone proper for lunch a couple of times and found reasonably priced food that, in my professional opinion, ranked as "authentically Italian". We took a boat ride across the lake to the town of Malcesine where we had another delicious lunch and somehow survived the kids' fighting and yelling and general carrying-on which surprisingly did not result in either of them either falling or getting thrown into the water below.
The hotel clientele was probably 80% German and 20% Italian (and then a rounding error: us). Most of what we heard spoken in the streets and on the boat ride and in the restaurants also reflected roughly this ratio of people. The people of the area itself, though, unlike Südtirol where the locals actually speak German as their mother tongue, are Italian but obviously cater to the German tourists and thus people working in the tourist industry tend to speak German. The signs, maps, and other information / documentation is in Italian, German, and often English as well. It's a good place for a family vacation. Highly recommended.
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