and I am so thankful.
Our day began very early, at 5:45AM, when I realized that we did not ask where we were supposed to park the car last night. I dressed and went downstairs to ask. Sure enough, we were parked in a towaway zone. Fortunately, the car was still there. Lonnie, very annoyed, had to get up and move the car into the hotel garage. After that excitement, we slept until nearly ten.
We had our typical breakfast. I had meat (kind of like bologna or other lunch meat), cheese, croissant, fruit, and, of course, Swiss hot chocolate. Yum! Lonnie tried what he thought was corn flakes. They weren't. He finally settled on yogurt, meat, cheese and a little hot chocolate.
After breakfast, we hung around the hotel until noon. The view from our balcony of Lake Como was beautiful. No sunshine, though. It was rainy all day. That did not deter us from visiting the Villa del Balbianello. One of the Star Wars movies was filmed here, as well as one of the James Bond movies.
Since it was raining, our hotel clerk offered to call a Water Taxi for us. Then he drove us to the Water Taxi stop. The taxi driver was very nice and offered us an umbrella. I had my raincoat and Lonnie thought he had his raincoat in the backpack, so we politely declined. A few minutes later when it started raining harder, he realized he did not have it.
We toured the grounds of the Villa, which were beautiful. Then we toured the Villa itself. Because it was built on the side of a mountain, it had six floors with only a couple of rooms on each floor. It also had some hidden staircases. Part of the house incorporated an old monastery into it. From the outside it looked like there was a small church building that you could walk into, but the doors were fake and the kitchen of the house was located inside it. Interesting.
After touring the Villa, we walked the couple of miles back to the hotel, then headed toward Angera, Italy. Once again the Garmin GPS led us off the beaten path. Driving on super narrow roads makes me nervous, and that is where the Garmin led us. Not good.
We stopped at a McDonalds to grab something to eat. It had been a long time since breakfast. Not exactly what we wanted but we were running too late to stop for a two hour meal.
We finally arrived at Angera around 8PM. I looked up hotels on Tripadvi sor and found one listed that sounded good. We found it fairly easily and even found a free parking place on the street (thank you, Lord). Now to the reason I am thankful for the rain. The hotel was wonderful and was half-price. What we didn't know was that this is a holiday weekend for Italy, and the clerk told us that if the weather had been nice, there would not have been any rooms available anywhere. The Lord is good.
And, the night clerk, who speaks only Italian, directed us to a nice Pizzeria to eat. Lonnie had bean soup (which turned out to be just pinto beans in extra liquid), I had mixed salad and we shared a vegetarian pizza which I thought was good, but Lonnie was not impressed with.
When we got back to the room, I noticed that there was no shower head. Lonnie really didn't want a hassle since we knew that the clerk did not speak English, but he did want to take a shower. Finally he thought of Google translator, typed in the problem, took it to the clerk and was back almost immediately with a shower head. Apparently they took it off to clean it and forgot to put it back.
By midnight we were ready to go to bed. Night all.
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