Belaggio, Mussels, and The Most Awe Inspiring Public Transportation… Ever?
European Vacation Day 2
Spectacular isn’t a word that I tend to use very often in my day-to-day life, but I can’t seem to stop saying it here in Lake Como. Many moments throughout the course of the past two days, especially yesterday (the day I’m about to write about), have been indescribably special. But for you, my lovely subscribers, I will take a whack at describing them anyways.
(Quick character refresh: Me— handsome, amazing, brave. Eric— my friend. Craig— Eric’s brother. Stephanie— Eric’s sister. Nate— Craig’s friend. Zoey— Stephanie’s friend. Rita (crowd favorite)— hotel employee who doesn’t seem to like us very much.)
The day started a bit later than expected. The 9am alarms came and went and, before we knew it, we were hustling over to the lobby so as not to miss the breakfast buffet that ended at 10:30 in the no-frills restaurant area. When we got there, Rita was not super thrilled to see us (shocker). She might have still been upset about the pool incident from the day before, or perhaps frustrated that we were catching the tail end of the breakfast window, but either way, her smiles had certainly faded a bit. The breakfast buffet was interesting! It consisted of bread, croissants, fruit, hardboiled eggs, various spreads, some meats and cheeses, and a strange concoction of rice, gelatinous cubes, and pale, sliced up hot dogs. The “hot dog salad”, as I dubbed it, was far too intriguing to ignore and, despite the lack of ketchup and mustard, I gave it a shot. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t for me. At one point our old friend Rita, the 70-something-year-old hotel staffer who had driven us from the train station and lectured us for being scantily clad the day before, grabbed the hardboiled egg from Zoey and started teaching her a trick on how to peel it, rip it apart, and eat it. Perhaps it was Rita extending an olive branch to our group, but I tend to prefer my eggs not manhandled by a stranger before I eat them.
After breakfast, we briefly returned to the room before starting our walk down the steep mountain trail back into the town of Varenna. Eric, Craig, Stephanie, Nate, Zoey, and I (AKA all of us… I just wanted to say their names for some reason) went to a local cafe for a quick coffee as we solidified our plans for the day. The first stop on our journey was Belaggio, a popular town across the lake from Varenna. In order to get to Belaggio, we got on one of the large ferries that frequently make trips from Varenna to nearby towns up and down the shores of Lake Como. The ferry ride, like all of the public transportation that we rode today, was pretty incredible. We all enjoyed staring out of the windows as Varenna shrunk in the rearview and beautiful new towns, like Menaggio, Tremezzo, and eventually Belaggio, started to come into frame.
Belaggio had a pretty starkly different vibe compared to Varenna. While it still had many charming shops and restaurants, it also was very clearly a more fancy town than where we are staying. There were designer stores, ornate architecture, fancy jewelry shops, and lots of expensive-looking hotels. The town, though, was still a ton of fun to explore. While searching for a good lunch restaurant in one of the windy, narrow back-streets, I saw a tall, handsome man in his 60’s who looked remarkably familiar. I got Eric’s attention and he made the very impressive ID that the man, who was also searching for a good lunch restaurant, was none other than Cris Collinsworth, former NFL wide receiver and current announcer for Sunday Night Football. I went up to him and introduced myself and told him that we were all big fans of his work. He very kindly asked (in his signature voice) where I was from and shook all of our hands before we went our separate ways. Nice guy! Small world!
We eventually found a perfect, air-conditioned lunch spot to refuel and regroup. We ate a variety of pasta, salad, pizza, and french fries. It was no hot dog salad, but it did the trick.
After lunch, we hustled across town to catch the bus that was going to take us down the lake. Despite the bus being very late, making our speed-walk through Belaggio a bit pointless, it was probably one of the coolest drives I’ve ever been on. The sheer cliffs on the opposite side of the lake, along with the stunning villas on the lake’s shores, made the 30 minute drive to the next town of Nesso a pretty easy one. If any of my readers have ever driven on the nauseatingly windy road that precedes the Bear Mountain Bridge on the eastern side of the Hudson River in New York, this lakeside road felt like that one to the fourth degree.
Nesso is a very small town. It had only a few businesses, two of which were gelato shops likely to account for the tourist traffic that has been exponentially increasing there over the last few years (according to a local man I met earlier in Varenna named Stefano). The main attraction of the town of Nesso is the picturesque, stone footbridge that sits at the very bottom of the cliffside village. The bridge, which probably stands about twenty feet above the water, has become perhaps the single most scenic place to jump into Lake Como, being flanked by beautiful ivy-covered homes on both sides and a waterfall behind it.
When we got to the bottom of the windy path, we were all pretty shocked about how magnificent of a spot it truly was. There were lots of other young people there too, playing music, smoking cigarettes, reading books, etc. It felt very European. Even after watching 20 people jump before me, I was still shaking like a leaf when it was my turn to go. Eric was kind enough to take a video of my first jump for me. A portly, tan Italian fellow around my age gave me a three… two… one… countdown before I made the leap. Even though the bridge, as I said, was only about 20 feet above the water, it felt like I was falling for about a minute and a half.
When I checked out the video, I was expecting to see me confidently scaling the stone railing and jumping in without hesitation. Instead, the video showed me cowering atop the bridge before jumping meekly outward towards the water, all the while flailing my arms as if I was attempting to fly away. I jumped in a couple more times before we left, gaining marginal amounts of confidence with each rep. Going into this trip, I wanted to do something every day that scared me. Jumping off of the bridge in Nesso scared the shit out of me, so that daily goal was accomplished. (It was also accomplished at breakfast when I ate the hot dog salad, but the bridge jump makes for a bit of a better story).
Last thing from Nesso: While we were all sitting on the banks of the lake drying off and getting ready to leave (drying off, by the way, means that we were passing around the singular hand towel that I brought from the hotel (sorry Rita) and using it to clean our feet before putting our shoes back on), a huge boat came barreling towards the bridge. The boat, very clearly, was not nearly small enough to fit under the bridge, so for a moment Eric and the rest of us thought that the captain was absolutely hammered or something and that we were about to witness something semi-disastrous (and semi-hilarious). It turns out that the boat, which was carrying a sharply dressed wedding party, had things under control the whole time. They scooted scarily close to the bridge, so much so that if someone jumped off the stone railing in that moment they would have landed on a wedding goer five feet below them rather than in the water, took some pictures, then backed out and continued on their sightseeing cruise of the lake. We laughed at the people on board for this bizarre stunt and waved them goodbye (along with shouting a few “ciaos” at them with the heavy Italian accent that we’ve all been working on) before starting our hike back up to the bus stop.
The bus ride home was beautiful as well, although it was slightly marred by the fact that a co-ed horde of local Italian ten-year-olds were probably (definitely) laughing at us, particularly Eric, for no real reason. Eric posited that they thought he looked funny standing in the aisle of the full bus or holding onto the railing while he was standing. Whatever the cause of the 20-minute-long uproar of laughter might have been, it was pretty fucking annoying.
The bus dropped us back off in Belaggio, where we got gelato and waited for our ferry ride back to our town of Varenna where we planned on eating dinner and watching the sunset. The gelato was great, but the ferry ride was even better. I didn’t have a seat on the crowded vessel so I shimmied up the front of the second deck of the boat and found myself stationed at a private, open window with insane views of the lake. I haven’t been everywhere in the world, not even close for that matter, but I’m confident when I say that it would be pretty difficult for someone to find a more spectacularly scenic form of public transportation somewhere else on this planet.
Back in Varenna we wandered on some streets that we had not yet been down in search of a restaurant for dinner. In our travels, we found a beautiful, secluded beach in front of a nice hotel and bookmarked it in our brain for later. We ate dinner in the town square, rather than on the water, where Stephanie and Zoey told us a rather insane story about some deep-sea welders that they’d met on a previous vacation together. We all split “a bottle of red” and “a bottle of white” and enjoyed sharing stories and chatting about the day.
For dinner, by the way, I ordered a bowl of mussels served over a bed of pasta in a garlicky, red sauce… or at least I thought I did. It turns out that my Italian skills still aren’t great, so the dish was actually just like 4,000 mussels in a big bowl. I think I ate more mussels at dinner than I have eaten throughout the rest of my life combined, no exaggeration. They were great, but some pasta and about twenty less of them would’ve helped the dish tremendously.
After dinner, we returned to the secluded beach, skipped stones for a little while, then went for a refreshing night swim. When we got out, we all used the (now disgusting) “foot towel” that we used in Nesso to dry off before climbing the stairs back up into town. Still ahead of us, though, was the real hike back to our hotel. In order to make the journey a bit more palatable, I bought a bottle of white wine for us to swig on the way home. The shop owner that I bought the wine from basically made me swear that I wouldn’t drink it in public because it was illegal “on Thursdays” or something like that. Not wanting to ruffle his feathers, I stopped in at a restaurant a couple hundred feet away and paid two very nice older gentlemen working at the restaurant to let me use their corkscrew for a minute to open the wine. After confirming that they spoke English, I asked “do you have a corkscrew” to which they laughed and basically said “what kind of restaurant would we be without a fucking corkscrew you moron.” Not an exact quote but that was the gist.
We waited until we reached the secluded trail to crack open the wine, as my conscious was barking at me after swearing to the wine seller that I wouldn’t open it in public, and we enjoyed most of the bottle as we trudged uphill, listening to Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo all the while. It started to drizzle as we were about a hundred feet away from our hotel, so when we returned we set up six chairs on our balcony where we listened to music, chitchatted, drank a bit more wine, and watched the drizzle turn into rain.
Signing off for now! It’s breakfast time and you know what that means! Hot dog salad<3.
Definitely get the recipe!! 🌭Have fun, sounds great so far!