Riva del Garda is one of the few places in europe that we actually stay in a caravan park and enjoy it.  At the park that we stayed in this year the people were lovely and we parked right next to the lake and loved it.  As you can see we could take our chairs about 5 metres right to the edge of the lake and enjoy the twilight, ducks and swans.  The parent swans were hilarious … really aggressive … they attacked this couple with a small dog.

The weather is very predictable in Garda.  The wind is light during the morning and then starts to come in about 12.30 pm and by 1.30 pm it is fairly seriously blowing.  Then it just disappears about 6 pm.  Consequently it is fantastic for sailing as you can pretty much always get races in in the afternoon.

John wasn’t sailing this time but there were many classes racing and of course John ran into a lovely British couple that he had met on Hamilton Island so he spent a fair bit of time in the late afternoons with his crew.  That left Till and I to wander around and eat gelati!

We had planned to have one day there to show Matilda as John had already had two weeks there while I was walking.  In the end we stayed three nights and we could have stayed way longer but John was determined to get us up to the Dolomites to go trekking.

Till having a go at paddle boarding … you can see the James Bond tunnels in the background.  There is a great car chase in one of the Bond movies that was filmed in these tunnels.

You can’t quite see it but Matilda had to take the paddle board back under a bridge right where the swans were.  She had seen them in action the night before attacking some people so she was too scared to push past them!

The next morning it was windsurfing lessons with Dad.  There wasn’t enough wind and John doesn’t have that much patience teaching people anything!  Consequently we gave up on this little game pretty quickly.  I won’t mention who actually ended up falling into these rocks … but I will say that it wasn’t Matilda!

And yes … I even managed a swim in the cold water … it was actually beautiful once you jumped in and so so clean!