Believing that we had lots of time in hand to reach our Rally hotel before the end of the day, John led us on a fantastic tour around a couple of the lakes, taking us back into Switzerland for part of the journey.
Stopping first at Stresa, we spent some time at the waterside soaking up the view of Lake Maggiore and its islands before completing a circuit of it and crossing over to Lake Como. Jean struck a pose with each of Craig and Jackie. We rode beside Lake Como for a short distance before taking a ferry across it to Bellagio to save time. Craig's wife Sue was flying out to Brescia and he was already realising that he was going to be late to meet her at the airport, so left the group to try to catch up time, but was still 2 hours late, a fact that was made quite clear to him on arrival!
The motorway around Milan was quite a contrast to the beautiful scenery we had just enjoyed - miserable with heavy rush hour traffic, all driving like maniacs, and I got separated in an outside lane when the rest had pulled in to a services for a stop. John had waited by the entry slip road and we saw him, just, to know where they had gone. We pulled in at the next services, refuelled, waited a tad in the exit slip lane, then concluded that they had probably stopped for a coffee as well so headed off on our own. Fortunately, my Tom Tom took me the rest of the way as we were unable to regroup, and it wasn't that far anyway. However, the journey before this miserable bit was wonderful.
Finally, despite the separation on the last leg, we found our hotel on the side of lake Garda and went to a restaurant next door for a well earned meal and a few drinks. It was Jackie's birthday, so I was persuaded to tickle the ivories despite not having touched any for months - perhaps the wine helped?
We had now also caught up with others from the Chapter, who had come by different routes.
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