{"id":12996,"date":"2025-04-24T23:12:30","date_gmt":"2025-04-25T06:12:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/?p=12996"},"modified":"2025-04-24T23:12:30","modified_gmt":"2025-04-25T06:12:30","slug":"cinque-terre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/2025\/04\/24\/cinque-terre\/","title":{"rendered":"Cinque Terre"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>We left pretty early from Florence (7:56a)\u00a0 and arrived around 9:30a in La Spezia.\u00a0 Our apartment was very close to the train station and we walked down a small hill toward it.\u00a0\u00a0 We found the place and Whatsapp’d the landlord and she told us how to get into the building and which floor to take the elevator.\u00a0\u00a0 It was a tiny old elevator, two of us and luggage was all that was possible to squeeze into it.<\/p>\n

It was the kind that has a heavy metal door on the outside and two smaller doors into the cab.\u00a0\u00a0 The type that if you forget to close any of those doors the elevator will not move again till someone closes them.\u00a0\u00a0 So are all three places how that exact same type of elevator.<\/p>\n

We lucked out and Vilma let us into our small apartments at 10a instead of the check-in time of 4pm.\u00a0\u00a0 That allowed us to unpack and head back to the train station to head over to the Cinque Terre town of Monterosso, the furthest town to the north.\u00a0 We figured we would work our way back south later.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Stepping out of the train was the best ocean view I can remember seeing.\u00a0 Hands down.\u00a0\u00a0 We walked around on the promenade and even took a stroll on the sandy beach.\u00a0\u00a0 We looked for gelatto but could only find the Tourist type so we passed on that.\u00a0\u00a0 We headed back to the train station after about about an hour and configured our Eurail passes to board a train to Cornigila.\u00a0 An IC train arrived on the track at the time our train was to arrive so we figured it was the one.\u00a0\u00a0 It wasn’t and it took us all the way back to La Spezia skipping all the other Cinque Terre towns.\u00a0 Turns out in Italy,\u00a0 they schedule two trains for the same platform at the same time.\u00a0 It happened to us again on Saturday, but we knew not to get on the train this time.\u00a0 That time we did get to Cornigila and found the 383 Stairs to the town.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Saturday morning we headed out for the Cinque Terre early as we learned a cruise ship would be docking early in the morning.\u00a0\u00a0 We went to Vernazza first, and had a great breakfast overlooking the small harbor at the bottom of the town.\u00a0\u00a0 They places are just so cool.\u00a0 When we were waiting for the train to head up to Monterosso we had an unexpected thing happen,\u00a0 we were all standing on the platform and a train was coming thru the tunnel (there are LOTs of train tunnels in Italy, and the Cinque Terre seems to be all tunnels.\u00a0 While standing \"\"<\/a>there both Scott’s and my hat blew off from the strong wind coming out of the tunnel, apparently pushed by the fast moving train coming thru that wasn’t stopping at Vernazza.\u00a0\u00a0 After that we noticed all the train folks and police on the platform were holding onto their hats we trains came thru.\u00a0 \"\"<\/a>We went to Monterosso for a bit and then took the correct train to Cornigila.\u00a0 But the stairs looked crazy so I opted out. (383 stairs up)\u00a0 Glad I did as I heard the town at the top of the hill was a bit of a let down.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Then we headed down to Riomaggio for a drink on the cliff side with Tami and Scott over looking the ocean like Kathy and I had done Friday afternoon.\u00a0 They had gone to a castle in La Spezia when we headed for the CT after getting into town.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>After our drinks on the cliff we headed over to La Spezia to \"\"<\/a>find our new favorite pizza place for lunch again.\u00a0\u00a0 Scott got the Fried Calzone this time and I heard a reference to a doughnut…<\/p>\n

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That evening we bought a couple beers and a bottle of wine and the ladies sat our on our balcony and we sat in the hallway chairs and drank lukewarm beer.<\/p>\n

In the morning we took that same FreccArgento 8588 to Genoa.\u00a0 We were the only ones in the first class car on the train.\u00a0 It was a very nice and quiet ride.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We left pretty early from Florence (7:56a)\u00a0 and arrived around 9:30a in La Spezia.\u00a0 Our apartment was very close to the train station and we walked down a small hill toward it.\u00a0\u00a0 We found the place and Whatsapp’d the landlord and she told us how to get into the building and which floor to take … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Cinque Terre”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-traveling-the-hiways-and-byways"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12996"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13132,"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12996\/revisions\/13132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}