And still the travellers' tales come in. Taking package holidays usually involves moving at off-peak hours, she writes, and airport hotels provide essential services such as an early morning wake-up call and a bus to the airport! This traveller left her Gatwick Airport hotel bleary-eyed at 3.30 a.m. and observed the lawns being manicured by 17 rabbits! An early morning return from the lakes of northern Italy did not produce a similar wildlife event, instead the pre-dawn delivery of bread and the deafening sound of the street cleaning machines "manicuring" the cobbled streets and footpaths, removing every trace of rubbish. The equivalent procedure observed in Dublin city centre was not so effective - but then the clean-living holiday makers don't leave so much of themselves and their litter on the streets to be removed. Walking along the medieval roads and paths linking farms and villages in the mountains above Lake Garda ensured a good appetite for dinner. These narrow tracks were often cobbled and passed beside farmyards through olive groves and deciduous forests with their harvest of blackberries and hazel nuts. Vegetable patches were heavy with crops of tomatoes (some large and mis-shapen and some tiny tasty varieties), aubergines, gourds and courgettes and the orchards often had sharon fruit among the fig, plum and apple trees. On approaching a meadow, a haze of butterflies would lift - large, deep brown velvety varieties along with smaller blood-red beauties among many others, and everywhere the sound of cowbells.
Feathered inhabitants of the lake included several duck families - the mother ducks in charge of clutches of between four and eight skittish ducklings (no sign of the father ducks here!). The youngest showed an amazing ability to run on water. They usually performed this feat when they were separated from their group and when the mother duck quacked furiously from a distance. The ducklings would lift up their stubby wings and seemed to rise up on their feet and run cheeping madly! Perhaps they learnt this trick from the hydrofoil which travels at great speed up and down the lake.