Palazzo Arzaga Hotel Spa and Golf Resort (and Gardaland again)

Palazzo Arzaga Golf

Hub was invited to his annual Saleri Golf competition at Lake Garda this weekend. This year, it was held at the 5* Palazzo Arzaga Hotel Spa and Golf Resort in Brescia. Like last year, we set out early for the golf club, he went off to play golf and I brought the kids to Gardaland. Would have preferred to spend the day at its leading Clarins Spa - but then it'd be difficult to ignore those 3 monsters that I've for some reason chosen to bring into the world.

The hotel and its surrounding golf course were beautiful. Apparently a popular choice of rich Germans and Austrians. It would have been nice to spend the night there like Hub's other colleague and his wife, but well, they have 2 high incomes and no kids to pay for. These kids are depriving me of many luxuries and to boot, you actually feel happy when you slave for them.

View of pool from the terrace

The journey to Gardaland should have lasted 30 minutes but of course there had to be a huge traffic jam about 8km from the amusement park. But I know the park by hard after more than 4 visits since last year - so we could be a minimum efficient with the rides, lunch, shows etc. Truth be told I marched the kids like a field marshall during parade. And screamed like one most of the time.

The Babies were really excited. Though within 10 minutes in the park I've lost Baby Girl. Sent Eldest Son to look for her while I queued up for the next ride - and ended up losing him too. Luckily he had my mobile phone so I was able to go to security and call him from there. And this misadventure served as a waking up call for all of them so the rest of the day went quite smoothly from there.

On average we queued up for between 10 and 30 minutes for each ride. And it was supposed to be low season. We caught only one of the shows - the ice skating performance with a new programme for the 2009 season. And as usual it was worth it, the performers and costumes were good.

Baby Girl wanted to do the Mammut roller-coaster ride again and was really happy about it. Eldest Son refused to do most of the tougher rides claiming that he would vomit (like my sis) - while the Babies were disappointed each time they couldn't do anything big and dangerous because of their height (or lack of). This year Baby Boy finally qualified for the Jungle Rapids ride and was really excited about it. But because of the crowds it wasn't possible to do anything more than once.

We left Gardaland when it closed at 6pm and headed out immediately for the Golf Resort. One had to be really efficient about this as in no time the whole region would be jammed with cars all leaving at the same time. There could be no room for mistakes (e.g. which lane/direction to take) as making U-turns would be very very painful.

Terrace and view from terrace

We arrived at the hotel just in time to change (I stripped in the carpark) and grab a glass of Prosecco before dinner. This year we had a sit-down dinner instead of a buffet like last year :

Rotolino di crepés con ricotta, spinaci e mozzarella di Bufala

Filetto di manzo alle erbe forti

Semifreddo al caffè

Very good food in a lovely frescoed dining room. Since I couldn't dress up from head to toe in Gucci like some of the other ladies, I opted for the colourful exotic look from my beaded Island Shop Chinese wrap to my new halter-neck 70's dress from Zara (that I just bought on Friday) and golden sequined Morocccan leather slippers from La Redoute - all for under 200 euros. I was actually wondering if I needed to change after all (i.e. from my old Armani t-shirt and super-cool British India pyjama pants), but aside from the fact that they were spotted with ketchup and cotton candy, Hub warned me when he met me at the carpark that there were diamonds and Gucci everywhere in the dining room and that I had better get myself changed. So I did. Thought I looked pretty cool too. Gucci is easy to figure out compared to a colourful dress from the teenage section chez Zara.

It was a tough and tiring late drive back home and I tend to drink too much when the wine is free and free-flow. So Hub had to drive though he was very tired (apparently the course was tough and endless) and had drunk even more than me and then he was pissed off with me for not volunteering to drive etc. Hello this is not the Red Cross, if he wanted me to drive he should beg or at least ask very nicely, don't you agree?

And as usual, he couldn't follow the GPS (he always drives so fast the GPS never has the time to tell him anything and in any case he's lousy at listening to women talk) and he would put the blame on me. Then he would get angrier when I send him to fly his kite somewhere else and he would drive like he's in a Ferrari on the Autobahn just to scare me. I mean I'm the only person in the family who's not ticklish, do you think I could be intimidated so easily? I reminded him that if he ever should get stopped by the Police he would lose his license not just for speeding but also for drinking - and he would look like an idiot without a driver's license at work. Otherwise if he gets us all killed it wouldn't matter since when you're dead you wouldn't feel anything anyway.

It worked and I noticed that he went down from 170km/hr to 140 and when I made small talk later on he answered nicely. Ah men.

PALAZZO ARZAGA HOTEL SPA & GOLF RESORT

25080 Carzago di Calvagese della Riviera, Brescia, Italy

Tel : +39 030 680 600