On day eight we returned to the wedding land...

We woke up quite early in the morning, and took our rations to the train station for a 5:50am start to a long ride to Santa Margherita Ligure. I did my best to make sure that we were headed in the right direction, as they had switched the platforms on us at the last minute; I asked a man there to confirm that we would end up in Lyon, and he said that we would. He was right. From Lyon we went to Torino (Turin), where we had a bit of a layover. The trip to Torino was great, as we got our first glimpses at the Alps. The hills started turning into bigger hills, and then the hills started being snow-capped hills. We hung out in the station there, ate some of our baguette, and gave the rest to the birds. Then we took the train down to Santa Margherita, where we arrived at about 3 in the afternoon.

From the train station, we headed toward the beach and into town, where we found the ufficio touristico, and asked them for a map and a push in the direction of our hotel. The hotel, it turns out, has been visited by the famed tour encourager Rick Steves, of PBS fame. The family that owns the hotel had put a blown-up version of a Christmas card that the Steves family had sent to the hotel. The hotel was the best on our trip, the other hotels being much bigger, and far less personable. As you might imagine, having received something of a blessing from Rick Steves, the hotel was well-populated with English-speaking visitors from the U.S. and Canada. We were welcomed nicely, cleaned ourselves up, checked out our E-mail on the computer that the hotel made available for such a service, met a few of the other guests, and then headed into town.

Penny had been looking forward to Italy if for no other reason than to get her hands on the gelati e pizze (ice cream and pizza). We stopped to get some ice cream (Penny had the strachiatella and I had gelato al limon) and post cards. The idea was that Penny was going to work on some drawing/watercoloring of some Italian scenes as a gift for Art & Julie (friends of ours who were to be married shortly after we returned). While she did that, I was going to hang out and write some postcards. It was a bit of an overcast day, but still quite enjoyable... so we sat on a bench at the water's edge for a while, and watched the people and fiddled with pencils and pens, drawing and writing postcards...

We headed back up to the hotel to drop off our stuff and headed back into town to get some dinner. As we were leaving we ran into two ladies who were staying at the hotel... When they arrived, we were in the foyer of the hotel working on the E-mail, so we had talked with them a bit then... they were heading into town to get some dinner too, so we invited them to join us. We enjoyed dinner and conversation at a ristorante in the center of town. I had some gnocchi, and Penny had pizza. When we were finished we all headed back to the hotel... I opened a bottle of wine that we had bought for possible use on our train trip, and Penny and I went to sit on the patio in the hotel's garden... we just hung out talking, enjoying the warm Italian night before going inside and off to sleep...

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