The Allisons

Lake Barcis

Here are some unauthentic Lake Barcis pics from the internet. We visited here last weekend, but these don't look exactly like what we saw. Although it is beautiful both in the pics and in real life they are slightly different mostly in detail.
The first pic is of the lake and town of Barcis. (Pronounced Barchis with a ch like child.) Of course there is no snow on the mountain yet and we didn't really even see it from this angle. We drove along the town side. It think this must've been taken from a boat on the water. The water flows down into the lake from the left of the picture. There are little rapids not unlike the Guadalupe. Looks like excellent tubing. I don't know if they do that in Italy. It's obviously much too cold now, but perhaps something to pursue in the summer.

This is an aerial photo. That looks to be the town on the right--but when we were driving, it didn't seem that far away from the water. There is also a dam on the lake. I think it should be at the bottom of the picture, but I can't really tell. I don't know what that white stuff. Again, these don't really tell what we experienced, but at least you get an idea. If you want better pictures, send me a digital camera. Ha, ha.

The water is green. Mike was like, "what's up with the water in Italy?". It's much prettier, clearer, cleaner than Venice but still green. Really green. It's super clear though. We didn't touch it at all. Burrrr. But there were some sticks along the bank that you could see the branches of pretty far down into the water.

Getting there was somewhat of a challenge. (Surprise, surprise-with Mike driving and me navigating we had several "discussions" concerning the progress of both.) We went to go poke around our house first and explore our new town. Then we tried to follow the signs to Lake Barcis. HA! We ended up going way out of the way to this other town where we thought we could get on the road to the lake. Plus, "hey--it's the more scenic route". DEFINITELY!

We were on this crazy, one-lane (except Italians insist on using it as 2 lanes), mountain road. We went up, up, up and then came down. Surprisingly I didn't get sick. Maybe it was because I was concentrating too hard on my plan of action for when our car would inevitably plummet over the side of the mountain and we would fall to our fiery deaths.

I exaggerate. It wasn't that bad, but almost. We were greeted at one point by a heard of sheep. Really. These of course are not the actual sheep--but it was similar to this. Picture about half as many on a road slightly down the hill from where this was taken. Down in the trees. That was our exact experience. Mike was really scared one of them was going to ram the car so while I was content to just sit and watch them go around us, Mike pushed through them ever so slowly. There was no herder--just sheep winding their way up the a mountain road. To where, I'm not quite sure.

A little way down the mountain we ran into a little old lady walking with like 5 dogs running all about. Our theory was that the dogs were supposed to be herding the sheep. The dogs chased our car around a turn and then went through the trees to catch us on the next turn. The Italians call them switchbacks. (Not the dogs. The turns.)

We did eventually find the lake (our original destination). It was oh so nice and I can't wait to take advantage of it during the summertimes warmer temperatures.