Travel to Manarola Day

Mom, Dad, Lisa & Connor left today.  Our phone rang at 6:30 so Dad could find out Lisa's room number.  When we got up later, we went to breakfast, packing taking most of Tom & Tracy's food and plugs then headed out for the train station with Tom & Family.

We are not having very good luck with trains.  Ours was 25 minutes late and although it did arrive in the extra 25 minutes, we sat on the track in the train car for another 25.  Oh, well.  At least we didn't buy connecting tickets.

The train ran up the coast for a while.  Stunning!  The Mediterranian is such a gorgeous blue!  It diverted over to a couple of towns, one of them Pisa, and we were just able to see the top of the tower from the train as we sped out of the station.

We arrived in La Spezia in the early afternoon.  We went to the Cinque Terre info office in the station and bought the path tickets.  They were 10E for adults (of which Meghan @13 is considered) and 6E for Helen @11.  The woman in the info office said we just had enough time to buy tickets to catch the next train.  Mike took off for the office and Meghan, Helen and I had no idea where he went.  He ended up buying tickets for 3 adults and 2 children.  Ooops.  Then the person who sold him the ticket didn't tell him that we were supposed to validate them so we got on the train and in 1 minute had a conductor ask to see our tickets and fine us 5E for not having them validated.  sigh.  Not our day on the train.

We got to Manarola.  Teeny-tiny town right on the water.  We could see the sea from the train station and it was lovely.  Went directly to the office of our apartment rental and met a woman who walked us up a steep hill to the top and showed us our 2nd floor apartment.  It was perfect!  We could lean out of the master bedroom window and see down the walkway to an arch out at the water.  AND, it had a washing machine!

We walked down to the water and sat and had a beer looking out at the dry docked boats and out to the water. The girls had a gelato and we earned 20 minutes of wifi.  This was the beginning of the realization that it could be fairly difficult to keep up with the blog without wifi in our apartment.  Oh well.

We bought food at the grocery and headed back up to the room to make dinner.  We watched the sun set from a bench at the end of our walkway with a glass of wine.  The sun disappeared into some clouds above the mountain so we went back and had dinner.  After dinner we headed back down to the gelato shop for another beer and another wifi code.  A good day!