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The Cinque Terre
Getting There is 1/1000 of the fun
Cinque Terre was recommended to us by my thrice-roommate Kris. He had traveled there a couple of years earlier, and really enjoyed it. So the next morning we checked out of the hotel, piled our stuff into Blue, and headed out. Vowing to not repeat the earlier Verona driving mishap, I studied the maps the night before, and memorized the directions. We promptly missed the first turn, and spent the next 45min trying to get out of Verona. Let me tell you, the web itineraries we got from the viamichelin website were turning out to be junk, but it probably isn't their fault. Rarely are the city roads labeled. AND, if you happen to find a road sign AND you find it on the map, chances are in 2-3 blocks the same road you are on will have changed names. But whatever. These directions even included the line (take the 5th exit out of the roundabout..) Well, if you had gotten to this roundabout the correct way then maybe you could pick out the 5th exit in time without crashing. We did find the roundabout in question, but from an entirely different direction. So we had to, in a split section, calculate which entrance that viamichelin assumed we came in, minus the entrance we did come in, and the result = 45min of more quality newlywed time. Also, an hour out when we had to switch freeways, we probably circled the same 4mile area three times trying to find the correct highway.
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| These are the descendants of the Roman road builders? |
We ended up at a regional airport at one point! Later we got caught in a huge traffic jam on the highway because of construction. When we finally got to the construction site, what we saw was all the construction workers looking over the side of the road...at the ground. But we finally made it to the coast, 4 hours into a 3 hour trip.
The Cinque Terre is a group of five small villages perched in the cliffs off the west coast of Italy. We were staying in the 4th one (from North to South), called Manarola. You are not allowed to drive your car into town, so we had to park our Blue in a lot just outside of town, and carry our bags down a pretty steep hill to our hotel.
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| Picture by Al Bonney |
We got there at around 1pm, and in my mind, I actually considered the fact that there may be some sort of Italian siesta that might affect us. And wouldn't you know it... The office didn't open again until like 3:30, so we considered sitting it out (that was a damn steep hill...), but in the end we brought our bags back to the car and explored the town a bit.
If we thought the hill to town was bad, the hill to the harbor was about 3x worse. Going down was fine, but going up was really tough. We killed some time, and had some delicious appetizers, and a hit of the coke. Lin-Wei was full and didn't want to finish her drink, but I calculated that the remaining amount was over $1! So I made her finish it.
We made sure to check in first before getting our bags. Then climbed that hill (it was really steep, in case I forgot to mention it), and brought our bags back and checked in. Our room had a pretty awesome view of the vineyards. Most of the cliff space is used for grape growing in this region, and it was pretty cool
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View by
Bed and Breakfast Da Baranin |
seeing that all around.
We had time to kill before dinner, so we hiked on the "Sunset Trail" to Riogiamorre, the 5th town. There is a hiking trail linking all five towns, and our plan the next day was to hike from town 1 back to Manarola. They say in the guide book that the hikes get easier as you go from town 1 to town 5, so right now we
were on the easiest hike. And it was cake. We explored Riogiamorre for a few hours, and met some nice people from Madison, WI. We hiked back at sunset, and
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| Wife with sunset and chocolate cracker |
also relaxed by the ocean. My digital camera has a "sunset" mode, so I tried to refrain from overusing it. I was not successful. We were starving at this point, so we found a restaurant in our guide book. Unfortunately they were ultra-packed, but we got a table in the corner. I think there was one waitress for 30 tables, so, even by European standards, we had an extremely long dinner. But we had some of the home-grown Cinque Terre wine, and we totally swiped the bottle. It's now in our kitchen. After 2 1/2 hours of dinner, there isn't much to do but sleep. 4 days of marriage, and already in bed early. But no one is surprised by that, probably. We needed our rest, cause next day we had a long hike ahead of us.
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 When we first got to Manarola, it was very quiet and no one was around and I thought to myself, "What a boring city and it was not as pretty as I thought." But once we walked down the hill to the main part of the town, it was great. Hustle and bustle, nice architecture, nice view of the Mediterranean, nice view of the vineyards, and there was food. |
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| It was a HUUUGGGGEEE dinner, and we only ate a fraction of it. I was sooo stuffed. |
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