Off to the Cinque Terre today. We were up and out on the street at 9:15 am expecting our taxi for 9:30, we waited ........ and waited .......no taxi. Michele the owner of our apartment had arranged our pick up to take us to the train station. So after 45 minutes or so I called one myself, it arrived in 7 minutes. Yay! Should have done that in the first place.

We arrived at a very busy station, the Santa Maria Novella. A neat 30's building in the early Mussolini Fascist architecture period. We were later than originally planned so I had to look up a new schedule. To get us to Vernazza we had to change trains in both Pisa and La Spezia. Using the fairly easy to manage self-service machines, I bought our tickets for just 17.90 Euro each. Next was to peruse the massive Departure board to find the platform number. Looking at and down the list. - no Pisa. Did I mention the train was leaving in 5 minutes? Panic starts to set in, there's probably 12 - 15 various platforms, people all over the place, which train was ours? Finally found an official looking guy who said look for the train to Livorno. What? Livorno? Turns out that train stops in Pisa first. Would have been helpful to know that. We ran like the wind dragging our bags behind us, found the platform number, ran up the stairs, there is was! There as a guy in a uniform whistling, looked like last call, the doors opened and we ran inside panting. The doors closed and it pulled away. Whew, that was close. When our hearts slowed down a little we settled in and enjoyed the ride to Pisa, about 50 minutes. We had about 45 minutes to wait there before we boarded another train for La Spezia, so we sat outside in the piazza and had a snack. Luckily the rest of the trip went smoothly and we pulled into lovely Vernazza about 3:30.

Vernazza is one of the 5 (cinque) towns in the Cinque Terre. This will be our home base for the next 3 nights. We each have a nice room with double bed and bath. As with most of these towns, the accommodation tends to be rooms for rent versus hotels. Ours is down a small alley near the main piazza at the water front. We settled in, had a siesta and then checked out the area. Found a neat ristorante and Beth and I each had risotto with local seafood (clams, shrimp, mussels, etc) and local vino bianco wine. For desserts (dolce) we had homemade cannoli filled with ricotta cheese and chocolate filling. Awesome.

Exploring the area is our plan for tomorrow.

Ciao