Hotel Riviera Finale Ligure

Flew to Milan from Dublin then took the train to Savona to board the cruise. Quaint little seaport town which I wish I had more time to explore. Forgot to take a picture of the ship! Not sure how I feel about a big cruise ship (3,800 passengers) but the price was right so thought I would experience it!

... the first time we had actually just stopped and done nothing and we felt a bit guilty...but it was bliss.

As the sun started to dip behind the hills we decided it as time to do some meandering. Laigueglia is connected to its glitzier sister by a 3km promanade which we decided to walk to. Once there we found a funky cafe and enjoyed a well earned beer.

Thu 12 Nov
Set our alarm even earlier this morning - 6 ...

... them like that any more (thank f**k!). I can't even remember how to ask for 2 beers (which is my current minimum requirement. It's 3 when Jamie's around). The lack of lingistic skills I have would be acceptable in most circumstances, but travelling with a Yank who is fluent in 2 languages that most Americans are even aware exist?!? Now that just doesn't seem right.

so left avignon today with thoughts to head to cinque terre, but due to traffic jam only made it as far as arenzano. found a cute pensione and jason was getting sick of driving so seemed like a good place to stop. tried a few others but was like walking through a sad run down old people town so didn't make it more than 5 mins there. well, happy hour time now, so will write more later....

... we turn misfortune to our advantage - literally! -by a simple swivel of the seat. Lunch is brought forward and consumed to envy and applause by fellow jammees!
We resume without further incident, and make the miles with time to spare for light aperos before evening meal.

And Day 4 sees us blasting off for Italy. Robbed blind by French; enter endless tunnels of neighbouring coastline, and dread paying for them... Fab drive (- and fantastic value when we exit for Garda: only 28 euros for whole stretch, where French extorted 38 for one-third of distance!) Hole up for ...

... was really cool. Today i'm going to visit a museum and go to a talk on Muslim immigration in the country, which should be interesting. I think i've gone a bit looney because whenever i go past the house where Christopher Columbus lived as a kid i always begin laughing till at least 3 streets later and i've no idea as to why. The churches here are fantastic and there's supposedly the remains ...

... to hunt bear ? It would have been a very desperate and starving man that tried. The bears were three times the size of todays Grizzlies. Our tail end guide decided to let us shoot some photos and I used a low light setting on the camera and disabled the flash. We had no sooner started filming when the back of the line Italians spotting our picture taking pulled out cameras quicker than a stiletto in the wrong ...

Went to Perletto a couple of weeks after I had arrived in Italy. Got there and went around, took some photos of the place. Rode the bike around, stopped at a few places to get a Moretti every once in a while. In the evening went to eat ...

... drive in an hour. And from there, I've daytripped today to Ventimiglia, which is even further west along the coast, right on the French border. I can't see the border, but I know it's close. There are a TON of French tourists here, and probably quite a few people who live here and just speak French anyways, since it's one of those towns that has been juggled between countries a lot over the past thousand years or so. So it's Italian now, but still pretty French. But really ...