It's a shore thing

THE tradition when camping abroad is to load up the car and hit the road. Two or three days and a ferry crossing later, you arrive at a site deep in France. It has been an enjoyable journey, but also tiring and time-consuming.

Thanks to budget flights, campers can now leave their car at home and let the plane take the strain, with the fly-drive option proving attractive for those wanting to travel as far as the Mediterranean.

We had long wanted to visit the area around Venice and the Italian lakes and so, when Eurocamp offered a stay in a Verona caravan at one of its sites across Europe, we chose the Bella Italia camp on the shores of Lake Garda. And then we set about finding the best way of getting there.

A search of airline websites revealed that the cheapest flights available when we wanted to travel were with easyJet, flying from Bristol to Venice's Marco Polo airport. Four return tickets would cost £180, including taxes. While I didn't fancy the long drive down to Bristol, there was an ideal alternative available - Virgin Cross Country's direct service from York, with return tickets booked more than 14 days in advance costing £29 per person.

Our journey to Bristol had an added frisson when Ricky "David Brent" Gervais sat two seats away from us.

At Bristol, a regular shuttle bus was available to take us from the station to the airport. After a two-hour flight to Venice, we picked up our hire car (booked in advance, again on the net) and spent two hours on a busy motorway to reach the site by dusk.

Entering our comfortable mobile home, which featured a shower and toilet, cooker, fridge-freezer and gas fire, I reflected that had we been travelling by car, we would only just have been crossing the Channel by now.

Sheets and pillowcases were available for hire to reduce the amount of luggage we had to take on the plane.

On our first day, we awoke to glorious sunshine and explored the huge site's wide range of facilities, which included restaurants, a bar, takeaway, supermarket, play areas and several pools. And at the bottom of the site was the shore of the lake in which we could swim, while enjoying spectacular views of mountains across the waters.

Spectacularly beautiful towns and villages ringed the lake, notably Malcesine and Sirmione, both boasting medieval castles and narrow, winding historic streets. We walked along the side of the lake from our site into Peschiera, an attractive town dominated by an historic fortress, and caught the local bus into Verona.

This graceful and prosperous old city is dominated by the fantastic arena, a well-preserved Roman ampitheatre where audiences of 25,000 attend summer opera concerts. You can also see the balcony where Juliet purportedly had her "wherefore art thou" moment with Romeo.

We couldn't stay in northern Italy without a visit to Venice, that amazing city of canals, gondolas, bridges and churches. The journey into the city is unbeatable, travelling by ferry along the Grand Canal and berthing in the historic centre, near St Mark's Square.

The queue to go in the basilica was too long, and so we spent several hours wandering the narrow and packed streets and climbing the bridges, including the famous Rialto. We gave the gondolas a miss because of the £100 price tag.

Our holiday over, we flew back into Bristol too late to catch the last direct train to York, and so stayed the night in a Novotel hotel near to the railway station. A rest in the luxury and comfort of our en suite family room, followed by full English breakfast next morning, was the ideal way to end what had been a thoroughly enjoyable holiday.

Factfile:

Eurocamp: A week's holiday with Eurocamp in a Verona caravan at Bella Italia (for a family of two adults and three children, without ferry crossing) costs between £294 and £970. For a brochure and information, tel 0870 366 7552.

Virgin Cross Country: For train information and fares, tel 0845 7484950.

Novotel reservations: tel 0870 609 0961

Updated: 08:46 Saturday, January 08, 2005