Day 4 Continued - Cinque Terre and the Leaning Tower of Pisa

Since we are writing, we have safely made it to our B&B in Pisa after driving to the southern edge of the Cinque Terre after torrential down pours over night. We are situated in the shady side of Pisa with merchants to our north and south selling knock off clothing items. Dark alley ways also surround our facility, making for a good night’s sleep. Let’s just put it out there that Ted booked this one! To begin, as we noted this morning, large amounts of water blessed us over night and for the majority of the day. Luckily, we got the worst part of the driving out of the way yesterday and the roads were pretty good today, other than a windy road up a mountain that seemed like it had well over 100 180 degree turns. This morning and afternoon, we toured the southern portion of the Cinque Terre – the towns of Riomaggoire and Manarola. The towns are very similar to the others, but each seem to have their own culture and vibe. To start out the fun in Riomaggiore, Ted was lucky enough to get to park our manual transmission vehicle on an extremely steep hill. Parking was minimal, so we had to park between an Audi and a BWM. Luckily, our car is small and we were able to fit, but we were pretty worried about what we had to come back to, as we knew Ted’s manual tranny skills were not the greatest on hills. We did not spend much time in Riomaggoire other than to walk around the buildings and take a few pictures.

To get to Manarola, we needed to hop on a train which runs along the Cinque Terre coast. We ended up waiting for an hour for the train, for what turned into a three minute ride through a tunnel to Manarola. We were flabbergasted. It was pretty depressing to find out Manarola was that close. Once in Manarola, we stopped at a restaurant Britt located on TripAdvisor which was highly rated. The food was deliciouso.

We proceeded to walk around Manarola and take a few more snapshots before heading back to Riomaggiore.

People add locks to the fence when they get married at this location.  Each lock has a special engraving for each couple that was married here.  Oh how sweet!

We will have to revisit the Cinque Terre another time when the weather is better. It is quite obvious from the scenary that it would be a beautiful place to hike and enjoy the sunset for a few days. As we walked back to the car, Ted began to fret about getting out of our parking spot. I suggested to Ted to nominate the parking attendant to back the car out for us. Being a true man, he declined. My next recommendation was for me to stand outside the car and “safely” guide him. While I did my best, I could not help but videotape his maneuvering skills incase I needed to use the video for any future blackmailing purposes. After what felt like an eternity to Ted, and a long few minutes to Britt, success was achieved without any recordables against either car. Britt hopped in, wiped the sweat off Ted’s brow, and on we went to Pisa. Speaking of driving, two things to note. Gas is not cheap in Italy, but at least in certain areas, they fill it up for you! You will see a snapshot of our fill-up today.

You may think to yourself, WOW, they got a steal of a deal. But, for those of you who aren’t engineers and are not keen to metric to English conversions, let me fill you in on a little secret. Please do not pass this on to our Government. OUR GAS IS CHEAP!!! SSSHHHHH. Sitting here, if I convert liters to gallons, and Euros to dollars, we paid approximately $9.90/gallon! Ted has now been advised to only drive 55 mph to maximize our fuel efficiency here on out While contemplating all of this on our drive today, we ran into this.

This, my friends, is the tollbooth we have had to stop at three times during our trip. Collectively, we have paid nearly 50 Euro in tolls for a mere 300 miles of driving. Ouch. Finally arriving in Pisa this evening did not allow us to visit the Tower until after hours. Our host suggested we walk there after hours to take some photos. On our way, hunger set in, and a pit stop at a highly rated Gelato shop called our names. Unfortunately, it did not live up to its hype and we sulked in disgust the rest of our walk. Arriving at our destination shortly thereafter proved worthy of a typical Leaning Tower of Pisa photo.

Ted Weak

Britt Strong! 

Check it off the bucket list and back we trekked to our ghetto neighborhood. Tomorrow Florence awaits us and a beautiful B&B in the countryside of the Tuscany region for the next three days.

Gelato #4 (the streak continues)