The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves...: Europe 2018 Day 11

Sunday, November 4, 2018

Europe 2018 Day 11 - Cinque Terre

We departed the apartment in early morning, heading off together but soon parting ways. John and Julie were walking across Venice to catch the water taxi to the airport, bound for home, while we were hiking to the train station for a day of riding the rails across Italy.

After a much-needed coffee at the Santa Lucia train station, we found our platform and boarded a high-speed Frecciarossa train. The first leg of our journey would take us at speeds up to 265 km/h to Florence, where we would switch to an inter-city train bound west for La Spezia. One final transfer to a regional train would then take us to Riomaggiore, the southernmost of the five towns of the Cinque Terre and our home for the night.

The ride was comfortable and relatively scenic, but the train fell a few minutes behind schedule after waiting to let another train pass. Jane was already anxious about the short thirteen-minute switchover in Florence, and suddenly that was down to nine minutes. Getting off the train, and finding and getting to your new train in nine minutes, at an unfamiliar station, and on crutches......seemed a daunting task.

It was a scramble, but we made it. Jane crutched like a mad-woman, as we had to move down about a dozen platforms and to a separate part of the station. At least there was no underpass to cross tracks (i.e. many stairs down and back up again), which we were dreading after seeing this at other stations we passed through. Given that we had second-class seats for this leg of the journey, with no assigned seating, the anxiety was real!

The mountainous stretch from Florence to Pisa was beautiful, viewed from our second-floor seats. At La Spezia Centrale, we had a comfortable amount of time to catch the final train for a very short ride to Riomaggiore.

Exiting the train in a tunnel, very common in the rugged Cinque Terre, we made the trek into town and up a hill - a common theme in the coming days. We were met by the elderly father-in-law of our Airbnb host, who showed us to our lovely apartment situated close to the bottom of the very steep hill that makes up Riomaggiore's main street, Via Colombo.

After settling in, we explored the nearby marina - downhill but still some stairs up AND down, then of course uphill coming back. We had a small dinner at a nearby bar, and I also made a trip to the handy Coop grocery for snacks and drinks, just a little further up the hill.

I took the opportunity to experience the cultural phenomenon of doing laundry in the bathroom sink, before hanging it out the window over a narrow alley below.....before running back down to the marina for some night shots of the town!