Busy is good, yes, and Italy busy is great! We are so blessed to have good company: this week, our friends Leslie & Tom from California are with us. We take day trips by car, by ferry and by foot.

Salò is calling again and again; I guess it develops into being my favorite town here at the lake. With an art museum, a gorgeous old town, good restaurants with views to die for, a great selection of stores (not one, but two bookstores, many boutiques, specialty grocery stores, for example a truffle store, toy stores, etc.) Gelaterias and bars, pizzerias and cafés, there is certainly no need to starve! On top of all this abundance of choices, there is the Saturday market, the biggest market I’ve ever been! Clothing, leather goods ceramic, food, shoes, everything you need and more stuff you don’t need! People everywhere, little tastes handed out, it is very hard to resist! Seafood, cheese, salami, chestnuts, fruit and vegetables, all those choices – it’s hard to not buy one of each …..

Leslie and I shared a bag of seafood goodies and thank god, Tom and Ted declined the offer!

Another day trip was the hike to Piovere with a great reward of a delicious lunch at the restaurant there. Piovere is a little more than double the size of Muslone with 144 inhabitant, vs Muslone with barely 60 people. So Piovere has it all, a restaurant with a small alimentary store, they have a church and a waterfall! Besides Enzo’s alimentary store, Muslone has only a church. And nothing else. And that is a good thing! So it is an easy 1 hour hike to visit Piovere, you hike along a stone wall that is several hundred years old, through olive gardens, and everything with this view down to the lake that keeps changing around every corner. Gorgeous!

In Piovere we sat down for a delicious lunch with sandwiches the size of a big dinner plate, pizza and a super tasty seafood salad!

Our hike also presented us with a few discoveries:

Our third means of transportation, the ferry, brought us to the east shore of the lake. To Malchesine to be precise. Another medieval town with another castle, another old town with narrow streets, cute balconies, great cafés and restaurants….. what else do you need? Did I hear line dancing? In Italy? Cmon! But here you go, line dancing it is…..

And what else is going on in Malchesine?

On our way back we had just the best view from the ferry