Day 17 - Cinque Terre

MORE PICTURES TO COME LATER (UPLOADING IS SLOW HERE IN SWITZERLAND)

This was a completely free day to do whatever we wanted. We slept a little bit later than usual, not much because we didn’t want to sleep the day away. Had breakfast in the hotel about 8:30. Gary went for a bike ride, while I walked around the town a little bit. Then, we went to the beach for the rest of the day. We’re not usually beach people, but when it’s a really cool place like this, we make an exception. We went to a spot on the beach where you can rent lounge chairs and an umbrella for 15 euros and plopped ourselves there for the day. We found two English magazines in the hotel - Oprah (minus the first 71 pages, which someone had torn out!) and Hello, so we had reading material. The water was really clear and aquamarine, like something out of a magazine or a movie. It wasn’t very crowded on the beach, so it was very peaceful. There were some people coming around from time to time offering “massagi” or trying to sell jewelry, purses, etc… We swam several times, read our magazines, got panini (by the way, panini is the plural of panino and panino means sandwich, so when I say we got panini, that means we got more than one sandwich - Italian lesson for today), and just relaxed until about 4:00.

Then, we headed back to the hotel and got cleaned up and went to the grocery store next door to buy stuff for the happy hour that the group was having on the beach at 6:00. Everyone brought stuff to eat and drink and we all hung out on the beach and chatted for about an hour and a half. Then, some people went to dinner at various places. We were pretty full, so we walked around the few shops that were still open and got some gelato. I think this was the best gelato so far on the trip. Since there was no computer capability at the hotel, I was really itching to at least check email, so we went in to this internet café and paid 1,50 euro for 10 minutes of time on their computer. Unfortunately, it was really slow, so I only had time to read a couple emails and respond really quickly. That was it for the night. We headed back to the hotel to get some sleep before heading out for Switzerland in the morning.