Italy Part 2

Well, well....where were we?

Yeah, Lerici.

Well...Lerici is where we ended last year. A campsite right on the water; a small free beach 5 minutes from there. Plus it was (again) uphill.

We got to LaSpezia later in the afternoon on Friday and as we were trekking up to the campsite I was worried that we'd have no place to camp. It was, after all, the weekend and we could have been screwed. Especially since it was later in the day.

Well, I couldn't have been more wrong.

As we entered the site I asked if there was a place for us and the answer was a definite "yes". 

It turned out that we were one of the only tents there for about 4 days! It was really great to have a campsite "just for us".

But I quickly found out why: it was very rainy for a couple days. We had some of the worst rain on our vacation those first two nights. It was quite romantic in the way that buckets of water being dumped on you for hours at a time and what is separating you is a millimeter of fabric...nice. For 3 days we woke up, shook the water and debris off of us, dried our stuff off and went on with our day.

After 3 days, we were thinking of moving on to somewhere more south. We asked the locals what the weather would be like—and even tried to read the weather in the local paper—and found out that they knew about as much as we did!

Side note: seriously...what is it with weathermen? They never really get the weather correct. If I don 't do my job correctly, I get fired. What happens to them??? Nothing.

Anyway...we stuck it out for another day and we are glad we did. The weather finally got better. She could do her beach thing and I could do my photo thing.

I went to the Cinque Terra by myself on Wednesday. Ivana didn't want to go because she was there twice already in her life. I wanted to go to re-take some photos I'd wanted to re-take for whatever reason. It wasn't the best day for photos but I did alright.

I got to Corniglia and there are 2 ways to get to the center: bus or walking up 382 motherfucking steps to get there (told you everything was uphill).

How do I know it was 382 steps?

Yep, they let you know. Little did they know it's 425 steps to our Lerici campsite and 450 in Verona...I was trained. Heh heh....

So, after having an ice cream, shooting some pictures and checking out the store that has "Hitler wine" and "Stalin beer" I went back to LaSpezia and to the campsite.

We had our favorite cheese almost every night: gorgonzola marscapone. Seriously, it is a taste of heaven.

7 nights in Lerici is too much. We saw everything the city could offer and we realized that 3 or 4 days would have been enough. But waking up everyday to the sea crashing against the rocks, eating dinner by the sea was worth the extra days and I love this place.

We did some posing for the camera:

After having our fill of Lerici, we went a bit north to Rapallo, a, as we later found out, shit hole of a campground and not much better of a city. It was dirty, chaotic and no lie: 7 gas stations in a row. Yuck.

And, again, the bus schedule was really not at all understandable. We got off, luckily, one stop further than we needed to and walked to the site.

We did a bit of sightseeing but it didn't really impress me too much. We decided to try Portofino the next day.

Portofino is where rich people come to fill up their yachts and buy extremely overpriced yacht clothing. Seriously, I felt sooooo poor there. And everywhere I looked, there were these "Biff and Muffy" types walking around speaking in rather pretentious accents. Yuck.

After visitng "my" castle, we headed back to Rapallo and gave Ivana a birthday dinner: anything she wanted in a restaurant. She chose crab. It was her first time eating it and the look on her face when when she got a bowl of pasta with 1/2 a cooked crab on top was funny. Her first question was "what do I do?". So, I have to show her how to eat a crab. (I have no idea how but managed to fudge my way through it)

After that, we had to get up early the next day to head to Milan. This was the longest day of my life. Up at 5, travel to Milan and to the airport, to Prague and then a train to Dresden. I was home at 9:30. Ugh.

All in all, it was a great trip!