Day 6 June 5th

Cinque Terra out the dirty train window


I (Nate) am going to be writing this today because of some of the things that happened today…. (You will find out more shortly). So, this morning began just like every morning, with the dreaded alarm buzzing in our ears. However, for some reason both of us weren’t too keen on getting up that early so we quickly disregarded it and went back to sleep until we were scrambling to get to the bus station by 9:30 to catch our first train to La Spezia. We made the train and were on our roundabout route towards Verona. However, before we left our hotel (Hotel Fiorentino, which has to be my favorite place yet!) I of course spent some time talking with the hotel owner and got some great suggestions on where to eat, visit, travel to, etc.. So armed with his words of wisdom we traveled onward to La Spezia knowing that there was a beautiful coastal area called Cinque Terra that was a few minutes outside of La Spezia. So once we got to La Spezia we took a quick look at our watches, did some math and determined we didn’t have enough time to wait for the next bus to Cinque Terra. Instead we took a short walk through La Spezia down to the bay to see the Tyrrhenian Sea for the first time in our lives and ate our lunch there before making our way back to the train station. Once back at the train station we caught the first train to Genova. This is where things started to get interesting… Not even 5 minutes into this train ride we noticed we were going through lots and lots of tunnels and then all of the sudden we saw a bright flash of sunlight and the most beautiful ocean scene I have ever laid eyes on, then back into another tunnel of darkness… This repeated several times and when we started to move back inland again we learned what that was we had just gone by – Cinque Terra (Strike one for the trip). However, as badly as we wanted to jump off of the train and run back we knew that timing was tight and we needed to continue on to Verona. We then caught a train out of Genova to Milano and then Milano to Verona where we arrived at about 8pm (it gets dark at about 8:30ish and we had no idea where anything was and we still needed to find a hotel and not for an outrageous price…). So, naturally we took off running and luckily found a place (for a bit more money than we wanted but at least we had a place) and our long day of train travel and first strike were done.
Nate