Comfort Hotel Italia E Lido Rapallo

We will be staying Riomaggiore (one of the five villages) and have booked our accomodation already at Casa Lorenza  We will be staying in apartment Nettuno.

What shouldn't we miss while we are here?

Partie tot ce matin pour se rendre a monterosso, premier village de 5 dans le parc national des cinque terre. Apres 1h40 de train, nous voila au deprt du sentier qui relie les 5 petits villages. A flanc de montagne, nous avons traverser plusieurs champs de vigne et plantations d'olivier de village en village ...

... the Med before taking us inland and through the olive groves.

On arrival at Portofino we were greeted with a similar village to those in Cinque Terre but not quite as quaint. Not sure what all the fuss is about...Santa Margherita wins our vote.

Back at Scooby for lunch of bbq chicken wraps and biscotti for dessert, then onto the autopista to lovely Lucca.

... moved and then as if to add one last jab she said, " Atleast we'll get away from the coughing guy", so now we are the ones who will catch sickness because we wanted out seats. We are damned if we do, damned if we don't. One way or another we can never make the people of the train happy.

We arrive in Genoa at the stop we think is ours. The weather is hot and sunny. We have a two hour lay over, so we stroll over to this beautiful town square that is within ...

... the 11C and there aren't any Roman ruins because the Genovans needed to build somewhere so they just built on top of the old stuff! Anyways it is built on a hill and the modern part is at the top and to get there you travel over little tiny streets and even smaller alley like paths where the buildings appear to almost meet at their tops. We also saw the 16th C palaces nearing the ...

... weird seeing her plate come out but I tried a little fish and it wasn't so bad. I decided to test out the after dinner drink Limonceno (lemoncello) for desert. Whoa! It was much stronger than I have ever had in the US. It was good but one was plenty as my throat was burning from all the alcohol. Then the waiter brought drinks that were on the house... oh lordy. It was a glass of a desert wine, very sweet, but after splitting a bottle of wine, my limonceno, and the wine I was ...

... Bellvedere Apartments we headed out for our first yummy Italian lunch which we were assured wasn't the best but was still pretty darn good. Grabbed some gelati afterwards and went for a walk around the point where we could then see some of the other towns. Next 5 days were spent strolling between the picturesque towns of the Cinque Terra - Riamiaggore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza, Monterosso and of course lunching at each and ...

... a few jumps off of the small cliffs across the water and relax on some rocks. Then take the train to Manarola- have a coffee or glass of wine at any local bar, then take the "Via dell' Amore" (walkway of love) to the last town, Riomaggiori. Buy a bottle of wine, anything local is amazing, and bring it to the "beach" (aka, ginormous pebbles & rocks) and watch the sunset. We definitely had an unforgettable experience on a cliff around there...can't get into too many details (hi, MOM ...

... wines were great, both red and white. Walking from the wine place back to the restaurant, we walked under the decorative arch shown here in a photo. Like so many places throughout Italy, beautiful artwork, most often religious, appears in common places. This arch looked like a church alter yet here it was outdoors connecting two buildings across the street from each other. Back at the Ristorante Eden, since we hadn't made ...

... lest our great republic destroy itself, one of them being politics. But we did, and then that somehow devolved into a very awkward conversation in which somehow Grace and Colleen got behind defending the French, and we revealed things that even Stanfordian students don't talk about between themselves. I blame Colleen for taking the bait despite my ardent efforts to steer the conversation away from such unbarlike conversation. In the meantime ...