Home Sweet Hurn

On our second day in Vernazza, we woke up around 10am praying for good weather. We wanted to be able to visit the other cities and did not want to spend all day hiding from the forecasted rain. Thank goodness that it wasn’t raining when we started our day.

Cannot get over this view - Vernazza

We trekked down all the stairs from our B&B and ate brunch at the Blue Marlin bar. Jeff had eggs and bacon, and I had focaccia bread ham and cheese sandwich. Eat all of the focaccia bread that you can while in Cinque Terre. It is delicious!

The waitress at the restaurant was a local and the teacher at the Vernazza elementary school, which has 16 children total. The day that we were there was supposed to be the first day of school. Due to bad weather, they postponed school. The kids were all sitting on skateboards and racing down the hills through the town. They did this all day long, over and over again. What an interesting place to grow up.

The five towns in Cinque Terre are Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza, and Monterosso. You can purchase a Cinque Terre card, which allows you unlimited access to the walking trails and trains between the cities for the whole day. (The walking paths were closed due to all the rain, but that was fine with us. The cities are all about 2 hours apart from each other if you walk the trails. The Hurns are not hikers.) Our plan was to take the train all the way to Riomaggiore, and then work our way back to Monterosso.

Riomaggiore was absolutely beautiful with a great little look out point over the city.

Riomaggiore

Jeff bought a cone of fried calamari to snack on.

We hopped back on the train with the intentions of going to the next stop – Manarola. However, we were unaware that some of the trains did not stop at all five cities. Some were like “express trains” that went from Manarola straight through to the last town – Monterosso. So, we accidentally saw Monterosso next.

Monterosso al Mare

Monterosso has the best beaches and the best resorts if you are looking for more modern accommodations. However, the town isn’t quite as picturesque. We walked out on the marina, and Jeff stood and watched the water splash on the rocks for 45 minutes. He loved it.

Next, we wanted to go back to Manarola and get back on track to visit the other two cities. But once again, we accidentally got on the express train, so we went all the way back to Riomaggiore. Oops. Thankfully, the correct train came quickly, and we finally made it to Manarola. We had lunch at Bar Enrica. I had another focaccia bread sandwich, because they are that good.

These are our "we can't figure out the trains" faces.

View of Manarola from the train station.

We walked out on the trail a little ways to take pictures of the town. There were lots of people swimming by the rocks, and a strange man building bamboo statues into the cliffs.

Manarola

The man and his bamboo art.

Another one of his "sculptures."

Area where people were swimming.

We waited at the train station for 45 minutes, and a train finally stopped to take us to Corniglia – the last city for us to visit. Corniglia is different from the other towns because it sits up in the mountains more and not down near the water. Thank goodness there was a public bus waiting for us at the train station. (The bus is included in the Cinque Terre card.) The bus ride was only about 2-3 minutes, but the trail from the station up to the town looked like it would have taken an hour.

Corniglia

This man was carrying grapes in a container on his back up the mountain.

After visiting the other four cities, we took the train back to Vernazza. We relaxed and walked around the city some more. We bought dinner (gyros and pizza) and sat out by the marina to eat. One of my favorite things about Vernazza is that there were two churches with bells that rang every hour. The two bells always rang about a minute apart from each other. It was so interesting to me and such a representation of “Italian time.”

We woke up early to get to the train station for our train to the Cinque Terre. Cinque Terre is a set of five small towns on the coast of Italy. The five towns are old fishing villages, tucked into the sides of mountains along the sea. To get there, you have to take a train to La Spezia, and then get on a smaller regional train to the cities of Cinque Terre.

At the train station in Rome, there were people everywhere that would come up to you asking, “Can I help you? Information?” Apparently they were pickpockets or wanting tips, and were not actual employees of the train station. There were signs everywhere telling you to only take information directly from the train company employees. So strange.

We got on our long four hour train ride to La Spezia. Our train car was full of Americans and Canadians on their way to Cinque Terre. They talked really loudly for the whole four hours while I slept (big surprise there).

Carrara, Italy from the train - where they mine carrara marble

When we got to La Spezia, we unfortunately found out that the regional train lines were striking. But really, what’s a trip to Europe without having to deal with a rail strike? No trains would be leaving the station for over three hours. Who wants to waste their day in a train station? Not the Hurns. We decided to take a taxi down to Vernazza – the city in Cinque Terre that our bed and breakfast was in. The train tickets for both Jeff and I were 5€ total, and the train ride would be about 15 minutes. The taxi stand wanted 70€ to take us to Vernazza. 70€!! Nope. So we changed our mind and decided to wait it out in the train station.

All of a sudden, Jeff happened to glance at the departure board and noticed that our train to Vernazza no longer said that it was cancelled, and it was leaving in 3 minutes. Jeff and I ran to our platform where the train was waiting for us – with locked doors. Everyone stood around on the platform for a few minutes until they announced that the train was cancelled again. Boo!

Then we had the brilliant idea to find someone to split a taxi with; that way it would only be 35€ a couple. We found a nice young couple; the husband was from Melbourne, and the wife was from London. They were great and absolutely hilarious. We found a taxi driver, agreed on the 70€ price, and piled in his little car.

We quickly found out why the taxis charge so much to take people to Vernazza. To get to Vernazza from La Spezia, you have to wind up a mountain and then back down the mountain. The driver was in a hurry to get home and watch a soccer game (really, he told us that), so he was flying around these curvy one lane roads on the side of a mountain. Seriously, he was go 90+ kph, when the speed limit was posted at 40 or 50 kph. Needless to say, I kept my eyes closed for most of the ride. Jeff was in the front seat trying to not to throw up, while the taxi driver sang along to James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” in his broken English with his Italian accent. This is no joke. He was really singing James Blunt. He also ironically sang “I Will Survive,” as we all feared for our lives on this taxi ride.

We finally made it to Vernazza 45 terrifying minutes later. Cars cannot drive down into the city, so the taxi driver dropped us off at the end of the road, and we got out and started walking. Good thing the town was really small with only one main road, so our B&B was not hard to find. We knew that there would be a lot of stairs, and I was so glad that we had backpacks and not rolling suitcases. We climbed stairs and then climbed some more stairs. As we were walking, a nice lady asked us if we were there for the hotel. We told her yes, and she led us into a small bedroom in her home. It did not look like what I remembered booking, and when I looked confused, she asked me if I was Kym. Nope. Whoops – we almost stole someone’s bed and breakfast room. We left and went back to the stairs. Then, we saw a gate with a note attached to it.

We went through the gate and climbed three sets of teeny tiny spiral staircases. Thank goodness for backpacks. There is absolutely no way that anyone could have carried large suitcases up the stairs.

When we got to our room, they key was waiting in the door for us. And this was the view from our terrace. BEAUTIFUL!

Climbing all those steps was totally worth it to have this view.

This is the view from the street. And that's our room - the pink building with the flag - waaaaaay up there.

Our room

All the spiral stairs up to our room.

We rested for a few minutes, and then climbed back down all the stairs to explore the town a little. We ate a really late lunch of artichoke, olive, and mushroom pizza – by far the best pizza we had in Italy. We wandered around the town looking at shops, souvenirs, and relaxing by the water.

You can see one of the other towns - Monterosso al Mare - across the water.

There were vineyards and grape vines all along the mountainsides.

Vernazza experienced a terrible landslide in 2011. It had been raining all day, and the weather called for storms all night. The locals were freaking out a little – boarding up their shop doors and putting sandbags out. The boats were pulled out of the harbor and up into the streets. One shop owner told me that he was packing everything away in case the store was flooded. Another shop owner told us to stay in our rooms up high and not come down if it kept raining. Thankfully, it did not rain while we were there, and we got to enjoy our time in Cinque Terre.

We had dinner late that night at a nice restaurant out in the main square area by the harbor – Gambero Rosso. Jeff had seafood spaghetti with clams and mussels, AGAIN. And I ate baked fish – with the head and all the bones still attached.