The journey begins...Cinque Terre

Thursday morning we left for Alba to check out wine country. The drive was pretty quick and it was nice to drive a car for the first time in over two months! We walked around Alba and stopped to pick up wine for the next few days. Alba is a really cute town and observes the lunchtime closing so we were able to do some window shopping and stop at the beautiful church.

Alba piazza

I showed Renee and Bob some Alba truffles and we did a little shopping before hitting the road to Cinque Terra. Before I left I had printed out directions to all of our hotels and Bob was first up as navigator on the way to Riomaggiore (the southernmost town in Cinque Terre). Bob also had a map his parents received from AAA before they traveled in Italy a few years ago. The problem with my directions is I didn’t have an exact point from Alba so we were a little confused from the start. We followed the signs that said La Spazia as I knew that was on the way to Cinque Terre. It was a pretty easy drive but we decided to follow the map and not the google directions…big mistake. We ended up on the scenic route…at night…in the fog. By scenic I mean pretty much ninety degree ups and downs through the mountains along the sea. The woman who owned the bed and breakfast we were staying at called just after seven to ask where we were. We told her to town and she replied “oh…you have a long way”. Bob looked at the map and said long way…we only have about twenty miles it can’t be that bad. That was just about when darkness set it. About thirty minutes later we ended up going to a little restaurant for dinner and the man told us it was another hour. I guess the woman who lives in the town was right! We actually went to the first of the five towns thinking we were heading in the right direction. Nope, got all the way down to the sea and head all the way back up. We actually did this again as we saw a sign with a town name and then under it in parenthesis it said Riomaggiore. Of course we lugged the bags out and asked someone only to find out we were in the wrong town! Oh and we saw the largest snail ever. Packed the car back up, got out of our parking spot which was probably at an eighty degree incline, and headed to the next town over and finally success! The woman had told us she left the keys and directions on the Cork (who by the way I miss immensely) board outside the office. We decided it would be better to go find out place then go get our bags. Another mistake. We walked down a very steep decline to the down and then up, down, and around the little hallways and stairways until we finally found our place overlooking the sea.

On the way to our place

It was amazing…even in the dark. We then had to hike back up to the car and get our bags. We got settled, opened a bottle of wine and began our nightly tradition of falling asleep to an episode of How I Met Your Mother.