Here we go! Day 2!
In the last post, we left off with our bags packed and Ollie all bundled up and ready to catch our early train out of Sacile. Destination: le Cinque Terre.
When Kathleen had asked me originally for a list of dream destinations, the top of my list was the Amalfi Coast or le Cinque Terre. The difficulty in getting a stroller around on those steps in Amalfi ruled that one out pretty early (early enough that the backpack carrier hadn’t come into the trip planning quite yet) and that was fine, because Amalfi is definitely a long ways from everything else I wanted to see.
Le Cinque Terre is still a hike across the calf part of the boot in Italy. Kathleen warned me that we would lose a good chunk of a day getting there, but just glancing over the photos online was enough to keep me determined, and she had never been, so it was relatively easy to fit it into our plan.
Execution was tougher.
Sacile to Venice was easy, it’s the regional commuter train and we were early enough that it wasn’t hard to get seats for the 45min ride. Ollie was pretty chill.
We changed in Venice for a longer train with assigned seats and a bar cart. Ollie spent some quality time bonding with his Aunt Kathleen and it was generally relaxed except the person in front of us didn’t love having a giggling toddler behind her for the 2hr ride.
But this is where my problems originate, because I got hot on that train and took off my cross-strap bag with our passports, my ID, and my debit/credit cards in order to take off my jacket. I’d gotten so used to keeping the bag strapped to me that I didn’t think to check for it when we got off the train in Florence. That one was also a dicey transfer because the window was about 15mins if I remember correctly. We knew that train was continuing to Rome with no more stops, and that’s where it was terminating, because they announced it at least 57 times during the journey.
But we got on the train in Florence blissfully unaware that our passports were heading for Rome without us.
It wasn’t until our next change in Pisa that I got off the train and mentioned to Justin offhand that it felt like I was forgetting something. His first question was about my phone – in my pocket, I showed him – then he said “Okay, your bag with our passports?” and I swear I felt my face go white. As soon as he started saying it, I felt the lack of strap across my torso, so I dropped my weekender bag and ripped it open, desperately hoping I had stuffed my little clutch in there and forgotten about it. Sadly, that wasn’t the case.
I had my meltdown right there in the Pisa train station, waiting for Justin to go ballistic, because the train travel had already stressed him out so bad. Kathleen immediately jumped to problem solving, calling Sondra (remember Sondra from the last post?) to help her translate at the information desk in Pisa. She instructed us to wait on the platform of our next departing train and then took off downstairs to the information center. We really wanted to catch our next train but it wasn’t the end of the world if we missed it, since it was another commuter train to La Spezia so they have a pretty consistent schedule.
Justin and I went through contingencies as we waited on Kathleen, talking about how we might have to lose a day in Milan to go to the embassy and sort out everything if it was all gone. Justin was cool and even-keeled during this, and when I tearfully asked him why he wasn’t angry with me, he said “You told me that on these international trips, something big always goes wrong. This is the something big. We’ll figure it out.” He and Kathleen were both optimistic that the bag could be recovered since the train had no more stops and hadn’t even gotten to Rome yet.
Meanwhile Kathleen was keeping me updated via Messenger that the train had just gotten to Rome and that the Trenitalia staff was sweeping it for my bag. A few minutes later, success! They found it! They checked it and everything was in it!
… But it was still in Rome. She quit messaging me for a few minutes, then came running up to the platform about a minute before our train came in. She’d worked out for Trenitalia to send the bag back up to Florence overnight and we would pick it up there the next day, since we had to go back through Florence anyway to get to our next stop. If all went well, we wouldn’t lose any time and we’d be back on track in 24 hours.
I’ll cover what happens with that in the next post.
So we made it onto our train bound for La Spezia, and a couple of us were exhausted from the day’s events.
We changed trains again in La Spezia for the local Cinque Terre train that goes to all of the villages, and then, finally, after a long and emotional day, we arrived in…
Monterosso al Mare!
Monterosso is split into the Old Town and the New Town, and we had come in from the train station into the new town. We had climbed along the fortified wall and then descended stone steps down on the other side of the hill into Old Town, where our BnB was located.
Little did we know that we would have another uphill battle, in the literal sense, because our AirBnB was up a very steep hill. This was the part where we were glad we were so fastidious in our packing, because not only did our stuff have to work for plane travel, it also had to work for long, possibly steep, likely cobblestone-y walks.
Our big rolling suitcase had the heavy duty wheels on it and was pulled by Justin, who again, had a baby on his back. I had the travel crib as a backpack and then my weekender bag (and no clutch with passports, womp womp!) and then Kathleen had her backpack and a mostly-busted rolling suitcase that our grandmother had sent her home with on one of her various trips to Washington over the years. That suitcase was for waters, Ollie snacks, and souvenirs. The wheels definitely shredded and then stopped rolling altogether by the end of this arduous climb.
But finally, we were at our AirBnb! We were met by a woman who spoke very little English, and we ran into another issue re: the loss of our passports. In Italy (maybe in all EU countries now? But definitely in Italy) if you’re staying at a hotel or bnb, you have to prove you’re legally allowed to be in the country. What did we need for that? Passports. So we had to get on the phone with the guy who actually owns the place and promise him that we would send along our info the next day once we got our stuff back, and luckily he was very accommodating and flexible about that, otherwise we would’ve been sleeping on a VERY beautiful beach that night.
It was just one big shared room but it was plenty of space for one night and it had everything we needed. We unpacked and changed clothes then headed back out to explore. The only thing we did glean from our host’s greeter was that there was a back staircase/stone path that we could use that was a more direct route back down into the village, and it was really cool! I was glad we got that tidbit from her, it went around some community gardens and wound through alleyways until we made it back down next to a pizzeria.
We wandered around for a good bit, taking pictures and drinking in the sight of the sea, the colorful buildings, and the small touches of life here and there.
We were there a couple of weeks before the high tourist season was set to begin, which (unlike in Barcis) was a good and bad thing. It was bad in the sense that some of the usual things weren’t open or available to us, some unphotogenic beach restructuring was happening, and it turned very cold when the sun went down. But it was good in the sense that we didn’t have to deal with crowds, tables were easy to come by, and costs were much lower. I preferred it this way!
The things to do in the Cinque Terre are: hiking. Sunbathing. Drinking wine. Eating seafood. I was all about those last two things, so after we wandered around for a bit, we found a little wine bar on the beach and sat down for a wine tasting. Spoiler alert: it was all delicious. And we tried grappa!
This was a funny experience because we were reining in an inquisitive toddler while we had fifteen glasses of wine on our table. This was the place where he finally learned how to high five and fist bump thanks to his Aunt Kathleen, and then she took him on the boardwalk and ran him up and down it for about 20 minutes, he was having the time of his life.
There was also an American woman talking to her American mother at a table behind us and she talked about us loudly. None of it was inherently bad – “Wow Mom look at them, they got a wine flight! That looks so expensive. How much is it, do you still have your menu? Oh, wait, is that it? I’m not paying 20 euros for that, they must have a lot of money. What a lot to spend on some wine, although this wine is good! But that’s a lot of wine glasses with that little baby at the table – no mom, I don’t want a baby, I already talked to you about this –” and on and on, and the thing is, we weren’t talking quietly. To anyone around us it should’ve been obvious that we were also American.
So yes, the wine was delicious (and objectively expensive, we got three of them so we dropped 60 euros for wine between the three of us) and the sun was going down, which meant the temperature was dropping, so we departed to explore some more and find somewhere to eat dinner.
So we went back into Old Town!
I love little restaurants crammed into alleyways, and The Man The Myth The Legend Rick Steves had spoken highly of this little place.
I got the seafood pasta medley, Justin got lasagna, and Kathleen got the swordfish pesto pasta thing. I also got a lot more wine. I was a happy camper that night.
This is one of the numerous times Justin displayed his high adaptability to our situation; I’m not sure I could’ve done a full diaper change on my lap, at least not at Ollie’s age and size, but Justin did this at least three times a day for the entire trip, he’s a superhero.
We walked back up the alleyway to our BnB, marveling at the view and at the stars, and went to bed happy but slightly worried about the logistics of the next day. But that’s for next time!
You, Me, and Ollie! 