A Ride to A New Chapter

The first day we arrived in Florence this summer was still fresh in my mind. It was the hottest summer of 38°C- 40°C. Humid and hot, like I said to myself, this is another Surabaya.

We left Zaltbommel on July 31th, early morning on a car ride with Alex all the way to Italy. It was summer time but as usual summer in Holland, the temperature that early morning when we left the house was cold even for a real Dutch. 

The traffic all the way was smooth it was a great pleasant ride through some European borders until we finally entered Austria. I was so amazed with the view of my surrounding.  It was an awesome place of hills and typical Austrian housings. We stopped for sometimes at a house of our friend’s relatives for a cup of coffee and a little chat in a mixed of Deutche-French-German language, and then got his skiing gears. 

It was about lunch time when we left the house, so we decided to drop by at a local restaurant for meals. The sun was right on top of us by now and it was a hot sunny day, it’s an amazing experience for a little tropical girl like me, to just left one cold spot and ended at one hot spot within couple of hours. So we took our warm clothes off and put on our sunglasses on, to resist that “silau, man!” of such striking sunbeams. We got the food, some meat with curry salsa for my hungry self, and as crazy as most “bule” I knew, we all sat outside on the courtyard in the heat of 12 o’clock hot afternoon sun.

So much for my facial bare skin for it went off without any protection on that early morning. However, I said to myself, worry not about your skin getting darker for you’ll stay longer this time! Worry no more of an insult such as ”Wow, you’re so black and ugly!” , worry not to such prejudice of those local airport staffs who would shout and rudely instruct me to get into the “TKW” section just because I look so “Jowo and ireng” to get my passport stamped before I could get out of that annoying instead of welcoming services and to finally sucked all polluted air of hot Juanda area.

We quickly devoured our lunch, drank the water, and got in the car to continue our still long ride to get into Italy, we aimed to pass the Italian border before evening and to arrive at the Lago di Idro camping site before 7PM so we can get the key of the caravan. We managed to do all these, though it took a while for us to really find the camping site. We were so glad when we reached Lago di Garda, but got a little confused when we found out that the camping site Lago di Idro what mentioned as “somewhere around the corner” on the guide book was so much further and harder to find. However, thanked God, we finally got there right before 7PM, got the key, parked the car, drop our luggage in the caravan, then off to dinner. It was raining heavily and the temperature was still low though not as cold as Holland. We’re tired from a long ride and decided to just get the “real” Italian pizza from a nearby resto. It was a satisfaction to charge “i nostri scorpi sono molto stanco”.