Surfers living in cities are poor creatures. They’re glued to their computer screens chasing swell forecasts or following event webcasts and spend every dime they earn to get to the sea.

Having mountains close by makes it easier. At least sometimes, when the water falls from the sky in big fat flakes and lets you enjoy its frozen beauty on a powder day. Other times, they make it harder – when they separate you from the ocean and put an almost insuperable wall between you and your love, the ocean.

In my case that’s the Alps. Fortunately they aren’t quite as insuperable as I exaggerated for the sake of the drama of this blog post, but they still are a pretty big barrier to overcome. Especially if you don’t have a car.

Luckily the man in my life does – and suffers from even worse case of sea-sickness than me and so he’s been superglued to the wave forecast for the Mediterranean for the past months (yes, they have waves and yes, you can surf them – in boardshorts!).

And last week, finally, his prayers were heard. A tiny dot of light blue (indicating at least a foot of wave height) slowly crawled towards the coast of Genua and we both had a weekend off. The dot was real tiny though, moving very slow and the drive down to Italy rather long, so we asked ourselves the same old question “Should we stay or should we gohoho?”

With the weather report in Munich threatening grey skies and wet from above rather than beneath, the decision did not turn out to be the hardest one we ever had to take. And any left indecisiveness practically vanished when we found out that a bunch of friends was staying at Lake Garda, the perfect half time stop to our destination.

So spontaneous, so good. But as the crux with spontaneity is, it’s not very consistent and so when we checked the swell forecast again on the campsite (after we got the flakey italian wireless to cooperate with our efficient German computers), the dot was gone…

With that our little adventure was too, but luckily there is a thing or two you can enjoy in Italy no matter where you are: food, sunshine and amore. And so we stayed for two more days soaking in the sun and watching our friends getting their windsurf on (which is utterly and totally gay, sorry but it just is – I had my prejudices and overcame them) before we headed back home.

If you’re wondering – the waves did come, a week later but they did. And next time, we will be there…