Cinque Terre- Travel and Day 1

We traveled from Florence to Vernazza via train rather smoothly (not without a little bit of running in the train station).  Scott and I were pretty excited to move on to somewhere a little less busy than Florence.  Once arriving in Vernazza, we were met by our hotel host, David, who led us to our room through the narrow alleys.

We arrived late in the day, so mostly grabbed dinner and went to bed.

The next day we set out to explore the area of the Cinque Terre.  For those who are unfamiliar, the Cinque Terre is five small towns along the western coast of Italy.  You can hike to, train to, or boat to all of the towns. Unfortunately, we learned that the hiking trail from Riomaggiore-Manarola-Corniglia was all closed.  This, in addition to the presence of rain clouds, led us to explore Riomaggiore and Manarola via train.

The first town was Riomaggiore.  We found a perched bar on the hillside to enjoy lunch and views of the sea.  We were hoping to walk the Via dell'Amore (Walk of Love), so named for the secret lovers' meetings of folks from different towns of the Cinque Terre.  This was closed too. :(  But here's a view of it from beyond the closed gate.

This is the view of Riomaggiore.  It's a little bigger than our home base town of Vernazza, but not much. It is already hard to tell some of these towns apart from the pictures!

Also, because there's not many non-selfie pictures of us, here's Scott and I in Riomaggiore.  We had just had our daily gelato.  (Ok, sometimes (most times) we have it more than once a day....)

On to the next town- Manarola.  In Manarola, we were able to do a small hike up and around the town through vineyards and gardens.  We were rewarded with a great view looking down!

Once we returned to Vernazza, it was time to head out for dinner, and we decided to take the plunge into the local flavor-- anchovies.  This is a specialty of the towns in the Cinque Terre because of the proximity to the sea. You can see they are discretely covered by the tomato sauce.  Good thing too, because I would not have eaten them had I been able to see them.  This was actually a surprisingly tasty dish.  Definitely better than I had expected.  And of course, there was gelato and wine to make everything right. :)