We managed to walk back to the train station without getting lost. We had decided to have our petit dejuner of croissant, oj and café au lait at the train station before departing for Cinque Terre. Waiting on the platform, our train seemed to come too early, but like a lot of other passengers, we boarded anyway. For a while, we worried we had made a mistake and our complex series of train changes would be screwed up. We were to change in Ventimiglia, at the Italian border, again in Genoa and once more in Levanto. But all was well. We’d just taken the earlier version of the same train.
While boarding the train for Ventimiglia, I helped hand up some suitcases for an elder couple (possibly as old as Connie and I). It turned out they were from Australia and seated across the aisle from us. We spent a lot of the journey talking travel and where we were from. When we changed trains in Genoa, the wife took two suitcases down and back up the stairs of train station and then came back for a third. I not sure I could have done that. Because most train and metro stations have stairways, Connie and I decided to reduce what we brought on this trip. Still, I have the big suitcase and have been schlepping it up and down those ubiquitous stairs.
The trip down the coast was nice, with the Mediterranean nearly always visible on our right, we passed through small towns and pretty countryside. As we moved along, the mountains moved closer to the coast and eventually we found ourselves going through tunnels both long and frequent. At Levanto, we changed to the local line and not long after that we arrived in Vernazza.
The train station is elevated over the town’s main street. We took the stairs down to street level with no idea of where our hotel was. Suddenly, a young man said “Rob Rice?” and held out his hand to me. I was surprised and asked how he knew my name. He was there to take us to our room. We’d exchange emails about our approximate arrival time and he’d just picked me out of the crowd. We were delighted and followed him down the street to a green door with “15” painted on it. It opened onto a large room with a couple doors and a long, steep staircase leading up to our room. Or, “accommodation”, as it was called. He was nice enough to carry our luggage up and left saying be out ten and leave the key on the desk. And that was the last we saw of him.
If our hotel luck had to run out, we could have done worse. The room was large with shuttered windows looking out over the main street. The walls, floor and ceiling had recently been nicely redone, as had the bathroom. It had a closet and 4 hangers. It had a desk big enough to hold a laptop and 2 chairs.
The shower is big enough to turn around in, though stooping down for the soap or shampoo – there being no shelf for those kinds of things – was a bit of a challenge. And while there is an outlet for an electric shaver, there is no hair dryer or any glasses, plastic or otherwise. We ended up cutting a plastic water bottle in half for a glass. And then there’s the bed. The mattress would probably be okay if there were a boxsprings below. However, being over flat springs gives it a tendency to sag in the middle. And, the pillows are wimpy. So, add to that no front desk and no maid service, our temporary home left some things to be desired. One consolation though was that this arrangement seems to be pretty common in Vernazza, if not other towns in Cinque Terre.