Travel to Manarola

About the picture of moonlight and reflections that I posted previously, this picture was taken from the Rialto Bridge, overlooking the Grand Canal. I got a lot of nice comments about it, and I appreciate that, but in the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I took about 30 pictures to get a couple of keepers. Jenae was with me most of the time, occasionally wandering off to look in the shops, which really gave me incentive to get it done.



The next morning we had breakfast in the hotel courtyard (included with the price of lodging), and the weather was good enough everyday for us to enjoy this setting to start the day:

And here we are, about to cross (by foot anyways) the final bridge in Venice, on the way to the train station on the other side. The luggage that you see there is all we have with us.

Now we're settled into comfortable seats on the high speed Frecciargento (orange arrow), which can go as fast as 155 mph. We had several banked curves between Venice and Bologna.

Upon arriving in Bologna, we learned that the connecting train was going to be arriving late, which meant that we would not be able to make the subsequent connections. Jenae "suggested" that I get up to the ticket counter and fix it, instead of simply hopping on the late arrival train. The first agent spoke no English, and I waited for an available agent that did, and used the train schedule on my iPad to communicate that we had a connection which could not be made. She was able to propose an alternative solution, which added about an hour and some extra expense.

After more than 7 hours of train travel (and associated station loitering), we arrived in Manarola at about 5:15 this afternoon. It's a cliffside village, and our apartment is up a steep path through the village (which I will refer to as the "trail of tears"):

and then down a couple dozen uneven stone steps ("the stairs of terror"):

Our apartment is the third level from the top near the right side of the buildings in this photo:

Here you see the "sunset gang", who would sit outside near our apartment to watch the sunset with their bottles of wine. Two couples from Pittsburgh, and a few folks from Australia. The Pittsburgh people moved to their next destination today, so perhaps we'll meet someone new there this evening.

We had a very nice dinner at Trattoria dal Billy, with first course of pasta and second course of grilled fish. The owner has been a fisherman in this area all of his life, and the fish was very fresh and simply prepared. At the adjacent table, a couple sat, in which the man spoke fluent italian, but both he and his wife were blonde. About 30 minutes into dinner, he turned to us, and said something like "I just have to ask, where are you from?", and that became the start of a lot of fun and interesting dinner conversation. They are from Miami, about our age, but he grew up in Sicily, and is now a colonel in the Marines. They both had great stories, and convinced the restaurant owner to park bottles of several kinds of Italian liquor on our tables, which we all repeatedly enjoyed.

And that leads to the final point in this posting, that we've had the opportunity to meet several nice people, including the first tourists we met while coming from the Venice airport to that hotel (they were from San Antonio), other guests at the Venice hotel, from Virginia, people from Boston at Piazza San Marco, another couple from Texas, another couple from Virginia on the train, who talked about UT football, the people here from Pittsburgh, the couple from Miami, and a couple from Canada. It all adds to the fun!