Italy

We arrived in Venice early Saturday morning. While European train travel is amazing, renting a car saved us hours each day of travel so we opted to drive on our holiday. There is a huge parking garage on in northern Venice and our hotel, Ca'Pozzo Inn, was just a short walk away. Venice, while beautiful, is a challenge to navigate dragging luggage - something to keep in mind - carry-ons are best if you can manage it. It's important to have something planned in the afternoon to keep you awake after a long night of travel, so we planned a private walking tour of Venice - the quickest way to see and learn the most with a knowledgeable guide. We hit the highlights of Venice: Rialto Bridge, St. Mark's Square, etc., learned how to choose a restaurant owned by a Venetian (hint: if there are pictures of food outside the restaurant, it's not owned by a Venetian), and used a pay-for-use toilet - that was a novelty. We got lost on the way back to our hotel - Venice is tough to navigate without a guide or GPS - and we probably walked a total of 10 miles that day. In retrospect, we should have taken a canal ride - the language barrier was really intimidating at first. We were tired and looking forward to an early dinner and early bedtime, but learned that Italian restaurants don't open until ~ 7 pm. A year later as I write this, I can still remember feeling like a zombie as I ate the worst meal EVER. We selected a Venetian restaurant like experts and read that you eat seafood in Venice. It was not good. I got gnocchi with rocket pesto and gouda - I still cringe at the thought of it. To this day I avoid rocket (eg. arugula). We headed back to our hotel and crashed - Venetian hotels are pretty pricey. Ca'Pozza was clean, very simple, but in a location that was easily accessible.

As we expected, we were ready to say adios to Venice - glad to have had experienced it but glad to leave! Cinque Terre takes some advanced planning. The 5 villages are accessible only by train and we knew we would pick up the train in La Spezia. The parking garage at La Spezia is often full even in shoulder season, so we purchased our spot in advance and were lucky we did as it was full on our arrival - a random Sunday in May. Navigating the streets of La Spezia and finding the entrance was not easy so allow yourself some extra time if you are on a tight timeline. It's easy to buy a Cinque Terre card right in the train terminal and the trains run frequently. A Cinque Terre card offers you unlimited train rides, access to the walking paths and use of the public restrooms without a fee. It's really odd to me to pay for use of a toilet, but that's Italy.

Choosing which of the villages to stay isn't easy, so I turned to Lonely Planet which recommended La Torreta Lodge in Manarola. WOW - I loved this hotel and recommend it to anyone heading to Cinque Terre. The staff was so friendly, the views of the town and ocean from every room - amazing, we had a small room but with a beautiful patio and view, there was an evening reception with wine and snacks - the bread and pesto, I can still taste it. The breakfast was phenomenal.

There is a hiking trail that connects the 5 villages (though when we were there the trail to Riomaggiore was closed), and we wanted to hike it all - part of it that afternoon and the rest the next morning. After traveling for 4 hours or so, we were ready for exercise. We picked up the hiking trail just a few steps away from La Torreta and hiked from Manarola to Corniglia that afternoon. We enjoyed looking at the hillside gardens, lemon trees and olive groves. There were other hikers as well but it wasn't crowded - just enough to have someone around to snap a picture of us now and then. We meandered around Corniglia for a while, looking in shops and admiring the architecture, then took the train back to Manarola to get cleaned up for dinner and then early to bed, as usual.

Full from an amazing breakfast at La Torreta, we stored our luggage with the staff, checked out of our room and used our Cinque Terre card to head back up to Corniglia. We then hiked from Corniglia to Vernazza and on to Monterosso al Mare. There was quite a bit more elevation change to this hike but we didn't notice it too much with the beautiful views in all directions. There was a feral cat hotel in the mountains which gave us a good laugh, vineyards and more olive trees. There was even a refreshment spot or two on this leg of the trip, cash only though. Monterosso al Mare was the most touristy of the villages and the one with the largest beach. We meandered through town for a bit and then caught the train back to Manarola to pick up our luggage and then headed back to La Spezia to get our car and drove to Cortona.

We really enjoyed our time in Cinque Terre and it was a highlight of our entire trip - I often think if we were the relaxing type we probably could have spent more time there. But in 24 hours, we visited 4 of the 5 villages, ate amazing food (my favorite dish was pasta with pesto and potatoes and green beans) and got in enough trekking to justify indulging in the yummy food. It felt just right for us.

Travel tip: Food. You can spend 4+ hours a day eating in restaurants - I'm just not a fan. I love staying in hotels with a hearty breakfast, snacking throughout the day and having a big rewarding dinner with time to digest it a little before bed. When we are abroad, we really enjoy looking at the variety and brands of food and drink at the grocery stores so, in addition to being a great way to save money, loading up on snacks at the grocery store is a memorable way to get a unique feel for your destination.

Oh Cortona! Beautiful. I wanted the feel of staying in an authentic Tuscan villa: Casa Bellavista just nailed it. A bed and breakfast situated in the quiet countryside with a huge wraparound balcony. It was idyllic, and our hostess Simonetta was so welcoming. For those interested, Simonetta also offers cooking classes right at the villa - another couple was experiencing this and on retrospect, I wish we would have. She had fresh pasta hanging in the kitchen! The evening before, we again looked to Lonely Planet for dinner and found Osteria del Teatro in Cortona - the homemade pasta was to die for, fabulous.

Biking the Tuscan countryside: After some diligent background work, I had reserved 2 electric bikes from Urban Bikery in Montepulciano, a village a short drive away from our villa. Happy "accident": Montepulciano is also the filming location of Volterra in the Twilight movies :) Shawn was thrilled. Anywho, if you are reading this and going to Italy, electric biking in this region is a MUST. Urban Bikery provided us a GPS with a pre-planned route along cyprus-tree lined dirt roads in the countryside (safe! no cars). You could choose from two itineraries: villages or wineries. I think with enough time and good weather, you could probably do both but allot about 4-5 hours for each. We chose the villages, as I am not much for wine, and we had a phenomenal time - it was literally like being in a postcard - perfectly picturesque. We biked to Monticchiello and Pienza, took photos, ate gelato and sipped coffee *sigh*, and then, despite our best efforts, failed to outrun an afternoon rainstorm. We huddled under a cyprus tree until it passed and then did some mudding with the bikes.

I'm usually not a fan of biking - hurts my tush - but my first time on an electric bikes was a BLAST. You can go fast and the hill climbs are easy peasy. This day was amazing - I still remember it as being one of the best vacation days we've ever had.

Usually somewhere in the middle of the trip I try to plan a rest and recover day, or something where all we have planned is to sleep in and drive. Today was that day. The drive to Sorrento was about 5 hours on the autostrata. The scariest part was going around Rome without accidentally going into Rome, but no worries, we made it to Sorrento safe and sound. Choosing a location to stay on the Amalfi coast was not easy - we chose Sorrento as it was the easiest to drive into and out of with good proximity to Amalfi, but whoa it was expensive. We spent more on lodging in the two days in Sorrento than the rest of the trip combined. I also wanted a nice view - we stayed in Maison La Minervetta, perched on a rocky cliff with sweeping views of Mt Vesuvius and Naples and within walking distance to Sorrento. We arrived around 2 pm and our room wasn't ready, so we relaxed on the enormous balcony taking in the view. After about 10 minutes of relaxing, Shawn asked me what we should do next. We don't rest well....

We met a friendly woman while hanging out on the balcony who told us about a restaurant on the water in Marina Grande that served fish caught that day and stayed open only until they ran out of food - Trattoria Da Emilia. That sounded perfect - and it was. I had red snapper pasta, head still on that fish, and it was phenomenal. Shawn had his first, and maybe only, Limoncello. We wandered around Sorrento's shopping district for a bit and picked out our travel souvenir: a lemon Christmas tree ornament.

I struggled planning the logistics of this hike in a big way. A single resource with all the information I needed didn't seem available, unless it was persuading me to join a guided tour group which I didn't want to do. Also, I only wanted to hike in one direction, not both, and that direction was down. Several bloggers talked about taking the local bus from Sorrento to Bomerano as the starting point of the trek, but warned they sometimes just didn't come. That seemed too risky given that we had a single day for the entire purpose of our trip to Italy. In the end, I opted to splurge on a private driver to pick us up from the hotel and take us up to Bomerano. Sorrento traffic was intense and the drive was slow and twisty (fair warning if you get carsick), so it took about 2 hours to get to the trail head. I also had little idea of how long the hike would take, some resources said 2.5 hours, and some said 8 (neither clarifying if that was single direction, both ways, elevation change, etc). Let me tell you: from Bomerano to Nocelle to Positano took us ~3 hours one way and we went sloooow, stopped often and took a lot of pictures and it's all downhill, including a set of never-ending steps.

The hike was beautiful, overall. We enjoyed all of the donkeys on the hillside, looking at the terraced gardens and sweeping views of the Mediterranean Sea with Positano. Again, it wasn't too crowded. We enjoyed this hike but I think we were enchanted by Cinque Terre just a little bit more. I figured we'd be getting into Positano at around 4 pm, but we were there by 1 pm. We had eaten a huge breakfast at the hotel (the BEST hotel breakfast), so we just snacked on gelato and cannoli and took the ferryboat from Positano to Sorrento. It was pretty slow - about 2 hours - but it was a beautiful way to see the coastline, the homes, ruins, etc. I had looked into a private charter boat to take us to Capri from Positano and then back to Sorrento, but didn't have much luck - they kept saying the views weren't nice. I'm glad they were honest, we really enjoyed the ferryboat and it was way cheaper.

We ate pizza for dinner when we got back to Sorrento and called it a day, because tomorrow was gonna be a busy one.

Rome. First obstacle was to get there. We planned to drop our car off in Naples and it became the most memorable car-ride of our lives. One wrong turn put us into a 30-minute detour, into the streets of downtown Naples where there were no lanes. Shawn was a mess and I was near tears as we finally found the train station and rental car drop off. The guy at the counter told us we had to take the car down to the parking garage and I told him there was no way in hell we were getting back into that car. He seemed to understand, and we ran to our train at top speed, barely making our 11 am reservation. Luckily instead of anger, we both just were grateful to be alive and on that train. A big marriage moment for us.

In Rome, we stayed at Atypical Rooms - a reasonably priced, clean room in close proximity to the train station and the sites we wanted to see. Can you do Rome in a Day?? We did our best. In advance, I had purchased a group tour of the Colosseum so we avoided huge lines. Next, we walked through the Forum - amazing. We grabbed an early dinner at a trattoria and rested for an hour back at the hotel and donned appropriate attire for our evening tour. From April to October, the Vatican is open in the evenings on Friday night, and so I had booked us a night tour to avoid the daytime crowds - the downside was not seeing St Peters Basilica during the day. Although Shawn was pretty tired, I convinced him to walk from our hotel to the Vatican instead of cabbing it. We saw the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, Piazza Navona and crossed the River Tiber into Vatican City. The Vatican Tour was impressive, there's a lot of money housed in the Vatican - it gave us pause. We saw the Sistine Chapel and tried to understand the paintings as best we could, and viewed the basilica at night. The tour lasted until ~9 pm and we meandered back to our hotel. Shawn was glad I convinced him to do the walking - we really got to see a ton of cool stuff.

We had a private car pick us up the next morning to take us to the airport, not much more expensive than taking a cab. Plane ride = rest time!