European Vacation

So on day nine, Penny and I had breakfast at the hotel, and spent some time talking to some of the other guests about their travels in Italy, and our travels in Italy and we suggested a few things to them, as they were going to be seeing some of the things which we had seen on our first trip to Italy.

After breakfast, we headed to the train station to catch a crowded train headed south to the Cinque Terre (5 lands), a cluster of 5 small towns right on the coast. Not knowing what we would find there, we considered going to a couple of the towns but, just in case we decided not to do that, we planned to first go to the town that our good friend Rick Steves put at the top of his list: Vernazza. The second of the 5 towns as we headed south, Vernazza was a simple little town about an hour from Santa Margherita. If you had enough momentum, you could roll from the train station down to the beach in about 45 seconds and say that you had seen the town. We decided to walk down to the beach instead, and wandered out on the breakwall and took some pictures of the amazing hills that surround this small harbor, as well as the harbor itself.

We weren't out to see anything specific, so we just started putzing around. We found a stairway which led to a tower, and started climbing. The town actually seemed to be built on top of itself, as we passed residences and ristorantes on our way up toward the tower. We paid 2,000 lire each (about a dollar) to gain admittance to the actual tower. We climbed our way up there, and snapped a few pictures as we took in the magnificent view of the Mediterranean and the grape-vine covered hills.

After some time spent soaking up the view, and resting a bit from another batch of steps, we decided to go get some lunch at the restaurant we had passed on our way to the top. Penny was taken by the composition of our view from our table at the restaurant, so she got out her sketchbook and started going crazy. She expressed her concern that she wouldn't have enough time to take everything in, so I decided to help her out by ordering the large carafe of wine. I fed her bread while she sketched. She did manage to take a break to eat (I had the pesto lasagne - delizioso!!), but still wasn't as far along as she would have hoped... so we ordered dessert and more wine... I truly could have sat there for hours... great view, great food, nice breeze... la dolce vita! I talked for a while with some people sitting next to us, as Penny kept working; after a while, we did manage to leave, and no one fell down any stairs. Penny didn't finish all the work on her drawing, but she did complete it as a watercolor after we came home from Europe.

We walked around just a bit more, exploring the town a bit, and found our way to buy ourselves some pesto and postcards. Penny still wanted to do some more sketching, so we plopped down by the beach and she started sketching while I wrote out some more postcards, and watched people... after a while, we grabbed something to drink before doing a bit more hurried shopping and caught the train back to Santa Margherita.

We went back to our hotel to drop off our bags, and then headed into town to get some dinner. As we were walking around, we found a little music store and went in to get some Italian music for the radio show. They spoke a little bit of English, but I was able to tell them in Italian that what I was after was "strana musica" (strange music). It was a small store, and they didn't seem to have a great selection of new music, but I was able to find a few things. Best among them was something from Fred Buscaglione. It was just hanging out at the counter, and the man who worked there tried to talk me out of it. "Macaroni," he called it. I like macaroni.

After leaving the music store, we wandered around to find a pizzeria. Penny wanted more pizza to rate. Along the way, we found a little store called "A. Pennino." When we went to Italy to get married, I was calling Penny "Panini," which is the Italian word for "little sandwich." SO, when we saw a store with "Pennino," we just had to get a picture. It looks as if they sell kids toys and such. We did find a pizzeria for Penny, had some dinner, and headed back to the hotel. We had bought a bottle of wine in Vernazza, and we invited the ladies we had dinner with the night before to join us in the garden for some wine... the didn't make it back to the hotel in time, so Penny and I enjoyed it ourselves... C'è vita!