Day 3 - 18 April, 2005: Pickup and drive to Bellagio

It was a very early morning today. We wanted to get to the ED Delivery center as early as possible so that we could get on the road and be in Bellagio in time for dinner. Our plan for the day was to pick up the car; find a Walmart or other similar store to get a Euro-spec hair dryer; swing by the dropoff location to arrange for our after-hours dropoff; go back to the hotel and get our gear; and finally get on the road.

We got to the delivery center around 8:15 or so right at the same time as another group of ED'ers; a guy and two girls (turns out that they were picking up an X3, too). In the parking lot were a score of exotic (well, exotic to me) BMW's; some brand new M6's, lots of 1ers, and tons of new 3ers. The weather wasn't real good; the sky was very gray and heavy, but at least is wasn't raining.

After about 45 minutes we were approached by our delivery specialist, Chris Leeb (he handled our delivery last year, too). He went over the usual stuff: insurance, roadside assistance (I wish he had gone over that in a little more detail; more on that later), dropoff procedures, etc., and then took us out to meet our new little "trucklet." It was just as we had ordered, and Chris went over it (mostly for Angela's benefit) for about 30 minutes. We left armed with directions to the nearest SuperWalmart, a bag lunch from the little bistro, and a light drizzle falling.

There are a couple of things that one can reasonably assume will be the same when one travels from the US to Europe: McDonalds is McDonalds, and Walmart is Walmart. Now, the Walmart wasn't exactly like they're like in the US, but it wasn't a foreign experience either. We found the hairdryers, looked all over for bottled water (they didn't have any. Wild Turkey - yes; water - no), finally gave up and checked out.

We finally headed south around 11. Our route took us through Garmische-Partenkirchen, into Austria, then Switzerland, past St. Moritz, into Italy, and finally down the east shore of Lake Como to Lecco and back up to Bellagio. The scenery was spectacular; there was a fair bit of recent snowfall along the route, and tons of snow on the mountains.

Once we got to Bellagio, we found that it's everything that we were hoping for. The town is right out of a painting. Our hotel is right on the lake, and our room is on the top floor with a great view of the lake and the towns of Cadennabia and Tremezzo on the far shore. Our dinner was excellent; on the terrace right on the water. I had tortellini with pesto and lake trout sauteed with butter and sage. Angela had Lasagne. We didn't bother with a fancy wine; just a "Mezzo Rosso," or half liter of the house red. We found during the trip that house wines in Italy are way better than any house wine we've ever had here.