So our amazing friend Naomi and her lovely boyfriend Bob are traveling through Europe in their green adventure van, wild swimming their way from France to Italy and back again. We were going to try and meet up but it just so happened that our favourite town val masino was about a 30 min walk from one of the swims Naomi wanted to do the most. They arrived on an unfortunately rainy day and after admiring each other vans and talking about the compleixties of gas and solar we hid away at the local cafe. It did stop raining in the late afternoon so we decided to make a break for it and walk up to val d’mello where there is an amazing wild swimming spot. The boy and I had already been up there for a bit of an explore and it was ridiculously cold - glacial melt - but we didn’t swim for long as there were loads of people about but no-one else swimming and we felt like a bit of a spectacle. And we were cold. Because we had walked up in big jackets we were pretty warm when we got there and because it had rained quite a lot in the last 24 hours the water was a (sort of) bearable temperature. We had quite a long swim, by val masino standards but it was still pretty chilly. Naomi has been blogging their wild swim adventures and I’ve nicked a couple of her photos, see the rest of the blog here.

As we got out it started to rain and the rain turned into a pretty heavy thunderstorm which meant we all got quite wet, again. Back at the vans we dried off and pulled up door to door to make dinner. Very cosy!