The Cinque Terre and Italian Roads

The Cinque Terre comprises five Italian coastal towns positioned between terraced hillsides and the sea and we sadly saw none of it except for the pictures we took from above (see below). There are a few reasons for this: First, we only had two days in the Cinque Terre before we were expected to arrive in Toulouse, France. Second, there were no B&Bs or hotel rooms available when we attempted to book a few days before arriving (a harsh side-effect of a heretofore flexible schedule). Third, although we stayed in La Spezia which is a short train ride to the southern-most town of the Cinque Terre (Riomaggiore), one of those days was my scheduled work day, and toward the end of that day I contracted food poisoning, or an illness very similar.

As I said in my last blog entry, I blame this illness on my husband since he jinxed me by remarking on how healthy all of us had been during our trip so far. I also blame him because this is what wives do when they experience a pain which feels like it's crushing their pelvic bone--it's an evolutionary thing.

So, the next day we left our hotel in La Spezia, but we still had time to use the family train tickets my husband purchased the day before. However, although I was over the worst of the sickness, walking from the historic area to the free parking spot near the Arsenale put me into a cold sweat and I couldn't imagine walking to the train station, then stressing over train departure and arrival times before an eight hour drive to France. Now, I don't want to sound like a wimp here. In the States, we can drive eight hours in our sleep, but the roads in Europe take more out of a person than those in the US. I'm not sure if it's because the roads transition from super sunlit coastal bridges to dark tunnels with an immediate jogging of the road one foot to the right, or if it's because of the tolls where your credit card doesn't work 10 percent of the time and you accidentally say to the attendant--who comes over when the cars behind you begin honking--"my card doesn't walk properly." In any event, I was tired and queasy and if I couldn't make it to my own house or my mother's, I wanted to be in the home of a friend....who just happens to have a lovely guest bedroom with a perfectly good en suite bathroom in Toulouse. So, I apologized to my husband a thousand times and said we could drive along the hillside road on our way north and dart down to a town or two if he saw fit.

Now, if you've ever been to or read about the Cinque Terre you know that the last sentence of the previous paragraph is madness! All of the travel guides tell you to use the train at all costs, and part of you knows they're right, but you can easily delude yourself into thinking a road wouldn't be on a map if it wasn't passable, and in any event you need to redeem a small part of your trip.

If you've ever seen the TV series "Ice Road Truckers" during its Indian Himalayan Roadways Season, you already have a pretty good picture of the state of the roadways along the Cinque Terre. In their defense, the trip was made worse by a landslide that forced us onto secondary roads--portions of which had fallen down the hill. The mid-sized semi in front of us gave us some perspective though as it backed-up multiple times to clear the hairpin turns, and we were lucky not to encounter oncoming traffic during the most narrow or blinding turns, but things became interesting after the truck left the road, the road turned to gravel, and our car ran point for five cars behind us. At this point, we did come across oncoming traffic--a Swiss car that spoke to us in French (for the first time) asking if the road was closed ahead. I swear I know enough French to understand him, but I was too frazzled to respond in anything but English--and even that was halting and incoherent except when yelling "Shut up!" to the back seat.

If you don't want to spend an hour getting to know first gear and the Hail Mary, I suggest you stay off any roads that would give you a view of the Cinque Terre. Park in La Spezia like we did; don't eat what I did (although I have no idea what that was); take the train like the travel books and any sane person would tell you to do; then, spend the day leisurely hiking and eating your way through what all the guide books say is the single loveliest coastline in Italy.

You may notice that the pictures below look remakably alike. The dark versions are taken with my phone, the light versions are taken with my husband's expensive lens-changing camera. We had a contest to see who could take the overall best picture during the trip and I think I won with my Florence photo of a statue reaching up to the Palazzo Vecchio, but we have yet to assemble our pictures in front of judges. I'll post the finalists though and let you know who won....if it's me. :-)