Laura & Damon's Adventures in Italy: A perfect beach bum kind of day!

Damon and I are both beach people at heart. Finding ourselves in a delightful beach town, with beautiful weather and one last day to spend here, we opted to spend it on the beach. We'd considered hiking again in the morning (this time south to Vernazza), a boat tour or fishing trip, and even renting kayaks, but in the end we decided that we were staying in the best beach town in all of the Cinque Terre so we might as well enjoy it. The weather has been perfect the entire time we've been here (probably about 80 degrees during the afternoon) and right after breakfast we headed down to the beach and snagged some prime beach chair real estate. We had a wonderful relaxing day at the beach, taking turns swimming across the harbor cove and watching the boats come and go as well as the ocean sailboat regatta which still seemed to be going on. I swam quite a ways across the harbor cove to a cave area, where I was able to see limpets, barnacles, snails, sea anenomes, sea urchins, and fish in the clear blue water (marine biologist heaven!!). The relaxing day left us feeling recharged and ready for our next city, Florence!

Not a bad place to spend the day!

This evening we once again hopped the train to another town for dinner, this time heading to Manarola, the 4th of the 5 towns if you count them from north to south. The trains are great, right on time and just a few minutes to dash to another town for dinner! We went on a self-guided walk of Manarola's town and vineyards at sunset courtesy of Rick Steves guidebook, then headed to dinner at a cute place on the hill in town with a fabulous view also recommended by R.S. We celebrated our last night in the Cinque Terre by ordering the special, crab with handmade pasta, which was both delicious and fun to eat! I kept beating Damon in how much crab I could shell the fastest, he was struggling with the cracking and shelling situation! We thought of Pop-Pop and how much he would have enjoyed the crab dinner here. They brought the bibs and the shell crackers and the metal toothpick kind of thing to extract the meat. It was so good! After dinner the restraurant brought us a digestif as they call it (they described it as a "mixture of 4 herbs" that they'd probably made themselves and we couldn't quite decipher the flavors) and limoncello. What a great way to end our time in the Cinque Terre. Tomorrow we're on a 9 am train to Florence, via Pisa. Arrivederci!