Gardaland

This week we went to “Italy’s nr 1 Amusement Park,” Gardaland, and stayed at the Gardaland Resort Hotel to celebrate Nick & Sam’s birthday on August 2^nd. Basically, we went to Italy’s version of Disneyland. Can you believe it? While Bill and I think Disney is okay, we have been reluctant to load up the gang and “do Disney.” We always have lots of good excuses like “we really prefer to go skiing on our winter/Easter break,” “it sounds fun, but its really not on our short list,” and “the kids are really still too young.” Honestly, we have been Disney-snobs and privately rolled our eyes at each other at the idea of joining the teeming masses in the hot sun for a week of Mickey & company. So, what is the first overnight trip we take as we begin our year in Italy, the cultural bastion of Europe? Italy’s version of Disney, of course! Therefore, we invite and encourage all of our friends and family to tease/chide/berate endlessly for being shamelessly seduced by a family resort with air conditioning, pool and theme park only a short train ride from Padova.

Gardaland is located close to Peschiera at the southern tip of Lago di Garda (Lake Garda) which is one of the beautiful alpine lakes in the Dolomites. (Lake Garda’s better known sisters are Lake Como and Lake Maggiore both farther west and closer to Milan.) We were all really looking forward to getting out of the heat of the city and our non-air conditioned apartment. I was looking forward to sleeping in air conditioning (ha ha – our air didn’t work the first night we were there and our third floor suite was hotter than our apartment), Bill was looking forward to not listening to me whine about being hot, the boys were lusting for roller coasters and Isabelle was just ready to have some fun! Picture Disneyland in 1975 and you have Gardaland in your mind’s eye. There were rides, a dolphin act, Broadway review, ice show, light parade after dark and lots of french fries. The kids LOVED it and we spent 23 hours at the amusement park in just 2 days!

We stayed at the Gardaland hotel, a very lovely and very modern hotel located about a half mile from the park. The hotel looked like it belonged in Southern Florida – design, building materials, etc. All things considered, however, we can’t understand why anyone would stay there more than once. Aside from the people, who were extremely accommodating, the hotel itself was not much for a high price. We don’t really understand the business model for this hotel. It is just a collection of hotel rooms for the theme park. Even the pool, which was nice, was closed on the Thursday we were there. They offer nothing else: no shopping, no bike rental, no hiking, (needless to say) no golf (Bill's comment), only one restaurant with an overpriced buffet dinner – soft drinks NOT included in the price. There was no hotel discount for Gardaland tickets. They didn’t even have their own shuttle bus, but relied on the Gardaland shuttle which stopped at the hotel every half hour. It would have been a much better deal to stay in Peschiera, which was only a mile away but had many hotels, lots of restaurants and shopping, ferry boats to take you to many other small towns on Lake Garda, and THE SAME free shuttle to the park.

It wasn’t too crowded because Italy’s official summer holiday, Ferragosta, is August 15 (Assumption Day) and it appears that most families wait until that week to go on vacation. We were there with LOTS of German families, easily recognizable by their hiking boots and/or incredibly ugly shoes with multiply pierced teenagers in tow wearing tee shirts that said things like “The Black Hordes of Satan – The Only Reality is Death” or the women from the former East Germany with bigger shoulders and narrower waists than Bill’s. There was a smattering of British families who we were always happy to chat with (and they with us) and a smaller number of French/Swiss/Italian families. And I would like to “out” the beautiful French and Italian women who, yes, do wear shorts and tennis shoes while walking around a theme park with their over-stimulated, sticky young children just like us. I didn’t hear any American voices although Bill thinks he might have just once although it may have been just delusional after he had to ride some spinning acorn ride 4 times in a row with the boys as I declined (the ride consisted of 16 airplane shaped capsules, 4 groups of 4, each set of four spinning around a central axis attached to 4 larger arms that themselves spun around the main axis of the ride – so imagine circles spinning inside of a bigger circle – and, oh yes, the whole lot being raised up about 80 feet into the air) Children less than 137 cm must be accompanied by parent, and after one look, I decided that I wasn’t going anywhere near that ride. Nick and Sam each rode twice, and Bill therefore rode 4 times. He was dizzy for an hour afterward.

Since I couldn’t find any mention of Gardaland in any of my many travel books, I’m guessing not many Americans use their too short vacation time in beautiful Italy to meet Prezzemolo or ride the Magic Mountain roller coaster. (Prezzemolo is the park’s mascot whose name in English means “parsley” and is also part of an Italian idiom essere come il prezzemolo meaning something like “to turn up everywhere” – none of which we could figure out other than Prezzemolo is a big bright green dragon/dinosaur sort of creature who is in fact, everywhere you look.) Apparently we have a small accomplishment under the column of “immerse yourself in Italy” as we traveled to a place largely unmentioned in the guidebooks, unknown to Americans and did it all with public transportation – from the bus ride to the train station, to the crowded train which required all of us to stand for part of the ride home to Padova.

As such, we came to Italy and have been willingly hazed into the club of theme park parents and have yet another excuse to not “do Disney” – we’ve been to Gardaland!

P.S. We have some great pictures, but have unfortunately messed up the softare to download pictures from our camers, so no photos until we get the disk from Suzanne or figure out how to download it from the Canon website (which of course they charge for).