No Stress-a in Stresa

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Hi all

Lyndsay here! I am anxious to type this last blog because that means that we are coming home tomorrow and that is bad news. I heard snow is on teh horizon - how terrible. Again, I apologize for my spelling, the keyboards here are funny and seems to be missing some of the keys. In any event, here is our last 2 days in a nutshell ...

On Thursday morning we left Levanto and hopped a train to MIlan, then to Stresa. The train to Milan put 6 people into smaller cars - almost like sleeping cars, but with 6 chairs. All is good until the 6th person (an older grandmotherly type) comes in - with her 40 lb. dog! Yep, in Italy, animals can ride in the train and bus with you, you just have to buy them "companion tickets". So, her dog was a sweetie, and lay at her feet teh entire time. I of course had to snap a photo, just to show teh degree of crowdedness in this train. Also, another intereesting point about the train. I go to use teh bathroom. Seems like a normal bathroom and all, till you flush the toilet, at which point a hole in the bottom of the bowl opens up and your business all just falls through to the train tracks below. Very sanitary, dont you think?

We arrived in Stresa, and what a jumble! It was SUPER busy with a ton of cars. Miles fo cars backed up to get into this tiny lake town. reminded me of trying to go up to Jasons moms cottage in Wisconsin. The town itself is small, but is located right on the lakefront, and is surrounded by Italian and Swiss alps. Very beautiful, as you can see from the pictures.

Now, before I get in too deep with explaining Stresa, let me tell you teh debacle we encountered before we got here. Of course, Thursday was ANOTHER Italian holiday, meaning everythign is basically closed and in Stresa (as well as literally every other town), all hotels, B & B, hostels, etc .. all booked up. We found one here in Stresa that had a room for 80 Euro (abour $130 per night.) It was thier last room, so we told them we would take it for 3 nights. We emailed them our confirmation and credit card information on Wednesday morning. Not having heard back from them by 10 am on Thursday, we called. Opps! They did not recive our email and now they are all booked up! We are now holding expensive train tickets to go to Stresa with about a 0% chance of finding a place to sleep on Thursday night. I begged and pleaded with the lady, but what could she do- she had no rooms available. I guess she must have felt bad for me, because she did say they she had a very small single bed private room in their off-site location (basically, their home with some guest rooms). I said we would take it. She tried to talk me out fo it, since there was only 1 single bed, but I toook it anyway. She said she would not charge me, just charge me 10 Euro ($16) to clean it. Fine I said, we will still take it. And away we ent, to go find out single bed room. Upon getting here though, this woman (bless her heart) found another single bed somewhere and had pushed the two single beds together for us to make a "double." I could have kissed her. As promised, the room is small. Basically, we can walk around the "double" bed on 3 sides, it has a sink, and a wardrobe. We have to go outside across the patio to use teh bathroom and shower (which are shockingly very nice). OUr first night in this room was so pleasant, we decided to tell her we woudl just stay in this room, rather than move to a true double. She is charging us $33.00 per night for this room, bringin our total for 3 ngihts to under $100.00. Versus, if we moved to a true double, it would have cost us $375.oo and we STILL woudl have had to use teh separate bathroom. So, as you can tell, we are feelgin pretty good about ourselves! Its amazing how a near crisis turned out so well.

Another totally random thing that I have learned. Of the 4 books I brought wiht me to read, 2 of them have mentioned Hutchinson Minnesota. Yes, I take an odd sense of pride in that. Jason laughs at me, but so what? None of his books mention wausau, right?

We took a day long trip yesterday into the Alps! How completely awesome that was. We had a train ride that twisted and turned and drove us up and into the villages in the mountains. I cannto even begin to explain how wonderous these Italian ad Swiss Alps are. I mean, I thought the Cinque Terre mountains were large, but NOTHING in comparision to this. Jason was looking forward to this trip to the alps for like, 3 months, so he was in heaven! We stopped for a while in a town up in the mountians and then, back on the train, so twist us down, where we ended up in Switzlerland. The ride down was cool as we saw all these random streams and waterfalls pouring off the mountains! So picturesque. We decided that once in Switzerland - neither of us liked it at all. The people were rude, they dont use Euros - they use Francs, and we couldnt figure out what teh conversion rate was (it ended up being about $1 US dollar to 1 Franc), and the things were expenseive. See teh photo of the Cheeseburger Royal (a quarterpounder with cheese, but for all you of Pulp Fiction fans out there, they call the burger a Royal because why? the metric system of course!) that we took at the Swis McDonalds. The value meal cost over $11.00 US dollars!

Anyway, we spent a lot fo quality time just taking in teh sights of somrthing that was a sight to behold.

The town in Switzerland was on Lake Maggiorie (which is the same lake as Stressa. If you look at a map, you will see that this lake in ENORMOUS!). The rest of our day was spent taking a large ferry boat from Switzerland all the way around teh lake, back to Stresa. Amazing views. Jason has probably taken about 100 picutres of the mountains!

I am going to let Jason take over now.

See the botttom of teh blog for the CInque Terre pictures.

PS: Britany if you read this over teh weekend, can you please call Pete and let him know we woudl like to pick up walter on Sunday night?

HI all-

Well we are down to our last day and although sad about coming home, we have found ourselves getting a little annoyed with a few things. An exampel was dinner last night. We went out on a limb and ordered a specialty call Gnottci. Lyndsay had heard a recommendation for it so I agreed. Anyways the dish tasted like crap. It was basically soft mini dough balls (picture barely cooked pancake dough, both in flavor and consistency) covered with "meat sauce". The meat sauce is basically brown gravy. So we had brown gravy dough as part of our meal---yuck. We also shared a pizza that had "sausage" on it. Well apparently in Stresa sausage is oscar meyer hot dogs cut up---again yuck.

Other than that, I have loved the views and location of Stresa, i think it may be my favorite spot yet. Like Lyndsay said its a large lake (think bigger than lake Mill Lacs or Lake Winnebago) and the alps are in the background surrounding the lake. THere is a ski hill in Stresa too!

Lyndsay touched on most things, especially the hotel room. What a crazy day trying to track that down. Anyways we found a place to stay and it ended up being a pretty good steal. I was though a bit sad because originally I was going to treat Lyndsay to a nice private room with bathroom and all in our last few days in Italy, but nothing was available unless I was willing to pay $800 euro ($1200) per night, no thanks. She has been a real trooper though and we have loved our time together. Although the hostels werent the best accomodation, they were a great experience and a decent place to lay your head for a few hours. We figured out over our crappy dinner last night that we have been on vacation for 17 days and have not watched any TV and have not spend more than 8 hours in our hostel/hotel rooms on any given day. We have been trekking 16 hours a day for 2.5 weeks, lots of miles, experiences, and stories. But I think we will need a vacation when we get home! See you all in a couple of days....Happy 80th Birthday Grandma!

Love,

Jason

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Photos

Royale with cheese!
The conversion rate is about 1 franc to 1 dollar, this was a $11 meal!

Bocce ball Italian style
We stumbled upon a heated bocce game in Stresa on Thursday. There was a crowd cheering on the participants and everything. The only thing that I thought was missing was a couple of beers!

More Cinque Terra
This was the third of the 4th of five towns after our long hike.

Comments

[Peter]

Winding down
Hey guys...looks like a pretty amazing little lakeside town. Running into any Schlettis in Switzerland? Love the Royale w/Cheese...do they dip their french fries in mayonaise? Do they "drown 'em in that (stuff)" as the movie says? Walter's doing just dandy. Call me when you land tomorrow and let me know when you plan on picking him up. I'll make sure one of us is around.