We first drove to the La Spezia train station, where our parking luck continued as we backed into a tiny spot in the garage right at the train station. We bought daily train passes, got a pizza snack at the store right next to the McDonalds (since our children had not eaten for about 30 minutes), and eagerly awaited our first train ride of the European tour!
Even more exciting was the fact that the train was a double decker! We pushed through the crush of people to get 4 seats together on the top... alas, the train mostly goes through tunnels, so the views were not amazing. We got off at our first stop, Manarola, and walked through a long tunnel to get into the town. Sammy drove his car along the tunnel walls - and when he dropped the car, he had to go back to the beginning of the tunnel to start the drive over. Sort of like writing the Torah, but luckily he only dropped the car once.
Once in Manarola, we wandered through the quaint streets of the town nestled into the cliffs all the way down to the water. There is a pathway carved into the cliff, which provides incredible vistas of Manarola as well as the next few villages. Alas, the walk was quite cold and windy, so we didn't get many great pictures of the other villages. But here is a look back at Manarola...
And a picture of all of us bracing against the wind. The picture was taken by a kind American couple, in return for us taking a picture of them. We stubbornly continue to use this old fashioned method of selfies, along with the long arm approach. However, we were impressed by how many people were using selfie sticks on a windy day near the water...
We got back on the train to head to our second stop - Vernazza. There is no cliff walk there, but there is a lovely harbor...
And a tower! We climbed up narrow steps to reach the base of the tower, which provided an amazing view over the village.
And then we climbed the tower itself (seen at the right of the picture right above). We asked a nice woman to take our picture. Alas, she neglected to get any part of the town in the background (this is the disadvantage of not having a selfie stick) but did effectively capture how windy it was up at the top. I would also like to point out that the tower had typical European stairs-- in other words, one person wide. But I made it up and down even with Lanna in the BabyBjorn without panicking. The boys have been fascinated by my claustrophobia and thoughtfully ask me if I am scared in every tiny European elevator that we take.
Here is the view, which we will have to get Chris or Jane to add into the background of the photo.
At this point, we were all cold, a little wet, and very tired. I decided to try to feed the kids again, but alas they were not hungry for the pizza we ordered and the place we chose did not have hot chocolate. (No worries- we got some at the store and made it at home later). So we headed back to the train. As we waited, and the platform filled up with an enormous number of tourists, we made friends with a couple from Ohio who were visiting Italy without their children... and then we smashed onto the train back to La Spezia, drove back to our villa (with the aforementioned grocery store stop), and spent a mostly restful night.
The next morning we woke up to full rain, which made packing the car (which was down 43 steep stone steps) even more challenging. Nevertheless, Joey and Sammy posed for one last picture of our view from the villa.
Cinque Terre was an amazing experience, which I'm sure would have been even better had the weather cooperated. The major challenge was the flood of tourists everywhere we went. We heard more English that day than we had at any point so far in the trip. I can't imagine how crazy it must be on a sunny day!
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