Journey: Day off driving!
Distance: 0 km
Campsite for the night: Camping Bergamini
YouTube link: Day 5

Today we had a day exploring some of Lake Garda on the little cuties. We cycled from our campsite into Sirmione — the next little town along. Sirmione is a medieval town stretching out on to a peninsula, so we cycled until we hit the castle walls and then walked the rest of the way along the peninsula to a historic Roman site … which was closed. Luckily it was a beautiful walk, with the lake on both sides and lots of park lands. Despite the threat of rain and the occasional rumble of thunder in the distance, it stayed dry. After not seeing the Roman ruins, we headed back to the town for lunch. Our main decision points for choosing lunch were somewhere serving pizza and somewhere with a substantial enough outside cover to hold off the rain. We found a little Italian pizzeria that met our criteria, and shared a pizza marinara and a huge fennel and orange salad, which was delicious despite being really simple.

After lunch and a little more wandering, we cycled back on the hunt for vines and wineries, and found the Zenato Azienda. It was open and did tastings, so we tried four of their local wines, a sparkling one (not-Prosecco), two whites and a red. The sparkling one using the local Trebbiano grape was so so, but the two still whites we tried, one using 100% Trebbiano and one a blend of Trebbiano with Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc were good and not the typical style of white we go for. The red was a blend of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and a local grape, Corvina, which I enjoyed but Emma was less convinced by. We bought one of the whites and an untried rosé and continued on our way to the supermarket to get some bits for dinner. After buying the biggest bunch of white asparagus you’ve ever seen, we carried on to the little harbour town for an ice cream.

We’d found a gelateria on the Happy Cow app that said it had good vegan ice cream, so we headed for that. It was the most unobvious ice cream shop I’ve ever seen — not a single tub of ice cream was visible and it looked more like a fancy coffee shop (minus any coffee!). After a bit of dithering outside, we went in and asked, and went for an almond hazelnut praline thing, which was absolutely amazing (and I’m not even that bothered by ice cream). As we were being served, the much promised rain came and for about five minutes, it hammered down with fat rain bouncing off the pavement. The rain stopped as we finished our ice creams and we continued on our way back to the van.

Sadly, the pool at the campsite was shut because of the storms, so we never got a swim near or in Lake Garda, but the campsite was truly one of the smartest campsites we’ve been to (and we have been to an awful lot of different sites of varying standards).