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Published: April 7th 2013
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Kitted upSo, the day has finally arrived. With the flat bare and spotless, our wordly goods on the back of a cargo ship, we said our goodbyes to Edinburgh and hello to a world of adventures. Our first stop, Cinque Terre!!!
We flew into a rather overcast Milan, and were hit with a wonderful experience...temperature above 10 degrees. It wouldn't have been much into double figures however was bliss to only get around with only 1 jumper on!
We bussed it into Milan, taking the opportunity to grab a quick 15 min powernap as the 4.30am start was starting to take its toll. We arrived into Milan Central, checked the time...pizza o'clock. We headed straight to the nearest pizzeria, as Rach's stomach was starting to grumble and as we all know, she cannot handle early starts. Not only does she struggle with early mornings it also throws her eating habits out for the whole day. Lunch was good, well, our diavola pizza was however the service was atroscious. We picked a restaurant where it must've been compulsary for the service staff to be pricks. We ordered our pizza to share, and the waitor looked at us like we were mental,
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Fred (the giraffe) packed for his adventure indicating with his hands that the pizzas were tiny! We decided that if it was really small, we'd get something else back at the train station afterwards. Well, when it came out, our half pizza each took up the bloody size of our dinner plate! I would've struggled to get through a full one. This was coupled with bringing out the wrong drinks, and utter rudeness the entire meal. Welcome to Milan!!
Anyway, on full stomachs, we ventured to the train station, found out which platform our train to Levanto was leaving from, got a coffee and rested in the sunshine sipping our machiattos and people watched some very dodgy looking people hanging around outside the train station!
We wandered off to catch our train, platform 20, carriage 9...well, turns out our train was only 8 carriages long so had to awkwardly ask where the 9
th carriage was! Thinking we were completely on the wrong platform, the conductor kindly advised us that there was some reshuffle and we found our revised seats. We settled down for the 3 hour trip south to Levanto. The trip took us through some beautiful mountain and coastal scenario and before we knew
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view from Ivo Camere it we had arrived. We swapped trains at Levanto, after been helped by the loviest of tourist guides at the train station. She pointed out that due to the recent floods and landslides, a number of the coastal trails we were intending to walk are still under repair and remain closed. She advised us of some other walks however and we'll do some research over the next couple of days on where to get the best views of the Cinque Terre. She also helped us buy our train tickets, as we arrived on a Sunday, we purchased a oneway to Vernassa and also a weekly ticket for the rest of our stay as you can only validate them Monday to Sunday which is a bit odd. (We plan to walk the trails in the morning, and then get the trains back in the evening).
After the short trip to Vernazza (Rach was bitterly dissapointed when this final leg of the 'coastal route' was completely enclosed in a tunnel with no views), we were met off the train by Ivo, our hotel owner. He proceeded to give us a mini-tour of the short walk to the hotel, then directing us
up the steeping entrance ever to our hotel, the steps were borderline like walking up a ladder, so steep and pretty treacherous with no hand rails and our massive packs on our backs! After settling into our hotel, we ventured down to the little harbour, and took some awesome picks of the sun setting over Vernazza, including our inaugral Trip Home jump shots. We sat down to dinner at one of the outside areas and watched the sun go down, sipping a glass of wine and a beer and talked about the adventures to come. Rach asks me, 'do you think you'll still like me after 3 months?'...with little Rachisms like that to keep me company, how could I not!!
We found a little cove on our walk home, walking through this little cave in the centre of town and took some beautiful photos of the setting sun. Rach, in her enthusiasm of her new camera, exclaimed to me, 'go stand on that rock and I'll take a photo of you'...so that's what I did and she laughed at me, saying, 'you were just, like, standing on that rock'.
Anyway, we called it a day after walking the
entire length of the little village that is Vernazza (it took us all of 10 mins to walk end-to-end) and finished the day with gelato...ahhhhhh, welcome to Italy.
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Dad
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\" Take 2 \" We enjoyed reading your first Blog. Looking forward to the next one.