Day 2 and 3

Day 3 in Cinque terra

After we uploaded the blog, we stopped by the local market. Boy if you lived here, you would sure miss the selection that we have at our supermarkets. Your selection of products here pretty much depends on Stefano’s own taste in what he likes in the way of pop, or beer and wine. They had one brand of beer, so Beck’s it is! Also picked up some Coca Cola Light. We had this when we were in Europe last time, and to our surprise they have changed the formula to taste what we believe to be sort of a Coke Zero. Tastes more like regular Coke, but with only 1 calorie.

We settled back on our little veranda with a table and chairs overlooking the ocean, and the Gigante monument that is on this end of town, and had a beer and a pop for Peggy. The seats were a little hard, so we brought out a couple of decorator pillows from the bed. We took a couple of pictures which you can see here. It took a lot of studying to figure out the timer feature on the camera, and we had some placement issues, but finally were successful in getting a picture of Peggy and I together on our “lanai”. We took a couple of pictures in the harbor, with Vernazza in the distance.

We dined last night in the old town section of Monterroso. We first went to a place recommended by our host at Il Gigante, and when we went there it was being attacked by flying ants or gnats. After extracting five or ten of off from each other, and having them fly into our glasses, we made the decision that this may not be our night for eating outside at this location. We decided to try somewhere else, and went to a place that Rick Steves recommended. But unfortunately we didn’t have a reservation, so we went up the street and ate at a place that had pictures of pizza on the menu board. We ordered up a couple, however we failed to see that they were actually bruschetta, so we were somewhat surprised when they arrived. I think we heard the waitress mutter something about dumb Americans as she strode back into the restaurant….) But by then we were so hungry we weren’t going to try something else, so we wammo-ed them down, in the famous Ken and Peggy style. So much for our initial dinner in Italy. We topped it off with some Strawberry and Chocolate Gelato, mmmm. Got back to our room, and got ready to go to bed. On one of the few channels that we could understand, we saw that the forecast for weather was somewhat ominous for tomorrow, and rain was expected for the whole Mediterranean area. We awoke to wind and rain, but had a great night sleeping, and have not experienced jet lag like the last time we came to Europe. We looked out and realized that we had forgotten to bring in the pillows from our evening on the veranda. Needless to say those bad boys were really wet. We brought them in and tried to dry them off with every spare towel we had. They must have soaked up gallons of water! The maid took them away today…..
We went to breakfast at the main hotel and had a great array of croissants, hard boiled eggs, prosciutto, and cheese, hard rolls, coffee and orange juice. We gathered our gear and set off for the train station, as we had conferred with some other guests that had been on the trails between Vernazza and Monterosso, and they said they thought the trails would be closed because of the weather. They recommended that we take the train to Riomaggiore (Rigormortis as one US lady called the town), and walk toward Monterosso, and go till they close the trails.
We got to the train station and it looked like everyone had the same idea. We jumped on the train to Riomagiorre (the furthest of the five towns) and walked around this hillside town. We hiked the Via Del Amore trail between Riomaggiore and Manarola. The picture of the people kissing has a bunch of locks that people put there to symbolize their “locked love” for each other, and they seal their love with a kiss at the spot. Peggy and I couldn’t find a lock, but kissed anyway. Manarola had a really interesting downtown area with boats parked on the street ready to roll down the main street to the boat launch at the bottom of the main street. I did a lot of narration to Peggy rom Rick Steve’s book as to the highlights of our scenic tour of Manarola, where the train station is perched right above the water as seen in some of these pictures.
We lunched in Vernazza at a really nice restaurant right on the harbor’s edge. We tasted the local cuisine and had a wonderful lunch of scampi infused pasta, and spaghetti Bolognese. Took some shots of the inner harbor and toured the church in the background. It continued to rain so we called it a day and headed back to Monterosso. We stopped by the place we plan to have dinner tonight and made a reservation for dinner. We ran into some people from Vancouver Canada at the restaurant in Vernazza, and took their picture in the harbor in Vernazza, and then saw them again making a reservation at the same time we are at the restaurant tonight. We bought our tickets for our return trip to Rome tomorrow, when we are catching an 11 am train to LaSpezia, and will change trains there for our 4 hr trip back to the big city, where we will meet Kitty and Bob and Cathy and Mike.

It is still raining, but we will try and upload this to the blog tonight. The thunderstorms have precluded us from connecting to the internet from this small town. We should be blogging again on the train back to Rome.
Ciao!
Ken and Peggy