I’m sitting here in our very lovely hotel room in Bellagio with the children, but without Ian. Where is he, you ask? I’ll tell you.
Lake Como is shaped like an upside down capital Y. Bellagio is at the point in the middle. It’s a nice location, but a serious pain for getting anywhere else by car and then getting back. It’s a small town and there’s not a heck of a lot to do. If you’re just adults you could go from cafe to cafe and drink coffees, shop in the shops full of things that most people don’t buy, etc. But with little kids who aren’t into shopping for silk, leather and glassware or drinking endless coffees (well, Lukie wouldn’t mind that last bit) there isn’t much to do here.
So today we drove to Como to check things out there. Como is a city of 80-some thousand people, so there was lots more going on there. Como is at the bottom of the left branch of the upside-down Y. Then we drove up the western edge of the lake to check out all the little towns on that side.
The problem with all this driving is that it’s on winding roads and I’m prone to carsickness. And I’m pregnant and prone to nausea. And Lukie decided that he would yell at the top of his lungs unless I held his hand. Since he’s short and sits directly behind me, the only way I can hold his hand is to sit sideways in my chair, facing out the window, and reach my right arm behind the seat to get to him. So I had my head turned all the way to the left so that I could watch straight ahead and try to avoid carsickness and my arm twisted all the way to the right to hold his hand. The whole thing was very uncomfortable and I was on the verge of puking by the time we got to Como. I had to hold his hand all the way up the western coast of the lake, too.
So at our last stop on the western side it occurred to me that we could just leave the car in one of the free parking spots and take the 10-minute ferry back to Bellagio. Then we could go back in the morning and drive back down the coast in a more leisurely fashion, stopping off in the towns that we missed on the way up. This would avoid a 1:45 minute drive back to Bellagio tonight. It was already 5:00, so this seemed very smart. We also have no plans as yet for tomorrow and this seemed like as good a plan as we were likely to think of. The whole lake is dotted with picturesque little communities full of cafes and gelaterias, so going to one coast as opposed to the other doesn’t seem so important to me.
Ian clearly wasn’t keen on the plan but said only that maybe we’d want to go to the east coast tomorrow and that would be difficult if our car was on the west coast. I don’t even know that that’s true. It’s possible that it wouldn’t take much longer to go to the east coast from the west coast than it would from Bellagio. I pointed that out but he didn’t seem moved. So we got in the car to drive back to Bellagio, telling Lukie that I wouldn’t be holding his hand. I hoped that he would go to sleep since his nap today was very short. He agreed, but started demanding my hand within 30 seconds.
I decided that I wasn’t up for the almost 2-hour drive and opted to take the ferry myself with the children. I tried one last time to convince Ian to join us but his mind was made up. He also clearly didn’t think that it would take him an hour and 45 minutes. I think it will probably take even longer. We’ll see.