April is usually an extremely busy time for us at UM. We'd normally be knee-deep in enquiries and bookings, as well as working over-time to get our activity base, Villa Miela, and our equipment ready for our first week of guests. Lake Skadar and the surrounding valleys are looking gorgeous....but this year we won't be sharing the Easter break or our gorgeous grounds with anyone other than ourselves. No, this year we have curfews, partial lockdowns limiting us to the municipality we live in, traffic on the lake has been suspended and Emma still has a week of self-isolation to go following her 14 days in quarantine which means she isn't allowed to leave our property. I can go and walk our dog Coco for an hour a day and pop down to the local supermarket, but that's about it. For the foreseeable future we are more or less limited to the borders of our land. Just as well, then, that we're marooned in a quite stunning spot! We have cherry, plum and quince blossom on our trees, a swimming pool that might soon be warm enough to use (edit, our kids jumped in yesterday!) and with the spring season cancelled and summer looking like it may go the same way, to keep our spirits up we're using this pause to get stuck into some proper sustainable “projects". Almost every off-season since we started living at Lake Skadar a decade ago, we've had some sort of ambitious project going on at Villa Miela as we've attempted to improve the set up for our hosted activity holidays - (I might recount some of them in future blog posts). Why should 2020 be any different, especially as we now appear to have rather more time on our hands than we had anticipated?
April is usually an extremely busy time for us at UM. We’d normally be knee-deep in enquiries and bookings, as well as working over-time to get our activity base, Villa Miela, and our equipment ready for our first week of guests. Lake Skadar and the surrounding valleys are looking gorgeous….but this year we won’t be