Adventures in the marvellous Mini of doom!

Dave Smart

Lake Iseo to Turin

Road side furniture...
Road side furniture...

I managed to book a hostel in Turin on the intermittent WiFi connection in the campsite and decided to head for Lake Maggiore which is where I stayed for a short while whilst working in Italy a good few years ago. The reason for my return to there was I often saw a hydrofoil sailing up and down the lake with its huge marine diesel burbling away and thought it was a pretty exotic form of transport, one I have never tried.

I arrived at one of the piers just as a normal ferry was about to leave and checked the timetable, and saw a hydrofoil sailing in about 40 mins so asked one of the staff about it, only to be told that service didn’t run every day, and what was worse, it didn’t run today. It was a real shame as it’s a form of transport I’ve often fancied trying.

Still I also remembered the roads round the lake were pretty amazing, so set off for a short while and enjoyed the lake from the roadside. On my way I spotted a very weird museum of unconnected old vehicles so popped in. There were all sorts in there from old tractors to single seat jet trainer aircraft.

I set the GPS for Turin with the settings to avoid toll roads and highways. This, initially, was great fun but became a little torturous later, so I decided to at least use highways, even with this it was still a pretty convoluted route.

When I arrived at the hostel, I had asked if they could organise parking for the car. It turned out the owner would park his car on the street and let me use the garage for €8. When he saw the car, he was amazed as he had had an Innocenti Mini in his youth and was delighted to see this one, he still charged me €8 to park though.

I popped out for something to eat and ordered a taxi to a salsa bar I had seen on the net. I knew the bar was almost 3 miles along a main road from where we were, but the driver seemed to go all over the place, the final fare coming to over €19, when I challenged this, he said he had ‘got a little lost’ and reduced the fare to €15, still a huge amount of money for such a short trip.

Keith Adams
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