Menaggio in the rain

Unlike yesterday, the overnight rain did not stop early in the morning. Today we had planned to take the ferry and cross the lake to Menaggio, rain or no rain. Today we took full advantage of our hotel's location, waiting nearly for the last minute before descending, buying a ticket and walking onto the waiting ferry that set sail almost as soon as we alighted. The trip across the lake takes only 15 minutes (and very little of that at full throttle), but the light rain that we had at Varenna turned into heavy rain at Menaggio. It quickly became clear that my raincoat would not be sufficient for this downpour. Fortunately there was a mini-market situated only a few minutes walk from the ferry stop, so I went inside and bought a full size umbrella (but not folding) for 10.70€. 

Once equipped, we walked through what seemed to be a normal town (they had shops! A bank! A pharmacy!) before finding the pedestrian district at the (tourists') city centre. There were a variety of shops and restaurants (and even a hairdresser's), so it didn't take long before I found the shop with the souvenirs and junk. By the time my wife had done her shopping, the rain thankfully had ceased, so we were able to continue our walk around the pedestrian area and down to the sea front promenade.

This was a wide boulevard with carefully tended gardens; there was a bower of wisteria that many people felt compelled to photograph and to be photographed within. We continued our walk along the promenade until we returned to the beginning of the pedestrian area, where we stopped and had lunch. The waitress said that there was a special, minestrone aka vegetable  soup, so we started with that. Afterwards my wife had a mixed salad and we shared another spaghetti al pomodoro, followed by tea. As we finished the tea, the weather - that had become sunny - suddenly changed and the temperature dropped almost instantly by a few degrees. Any thoughts that I might have entertained about having gelato were immediately discarded, as it was clear that the rain would start to fall in a minute or two.

The rain, light at first, started as we were leaving the restaurant, with a ten minute walk ahead of us. The intensity increased swiftly but fortunately did not reach the same level as in the morning. I would have paid a return visit to the mini-market but it was closed (siesta); just as well, as there was a ferry loading when we arrived, but this was going to Bellagio. I thought that we would have a half-hour wait until the ferry to Varenna would arrive, but fortunately I was wrong, as almost immediately arrived another ferry, this one headed to Varenna. Another 15 minutes on the ferry and a quick dash across the road: we were home!

Although there's no mention of this in today's history list (it will appear tomorrow), today is our first grand-daughter's eight birthday.

So much for yesterday's blogger hint; the pictures today include the HTML code margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;. It seems that the 'margin-right' gets turned into 'margin-left' as a result of justification, so that's something to look out for.

I would love a large hot chocolate, with or without cream, but somehow I don't think that it's going to happen.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
171	02/05/2009	Heron - River of fortune	Heron
1213	02/05/2019	Diet	Health, Anaemia, Diet