Travel day a visit to Lerici

Today was travel day. As there is rain due from Monday night through to Thursday early across the whole region, we have decided to stay at an AirBnB in the middle of nowhere, but drivable to Cinque Terre, Luca and Pisa. Tomorrow we are planning to visit Cinque Terre by boat, which departs from Lerici. 

On the way to the house we stopped for 2 hours in Lerici. It is a Sunday on a bank holiday in Italy so the place was heaving, and after following what would be called a dickhead in to one car park, testa di cazzo in Italian, possibly, who parked such that no-one could pass him, we ended up parking on the street. The town is perched on the hill, with a harbour and beach and was lovely. 

We then went on to the villa, and the sat nav took us to the middle of town, and we ended up redoing the route to arrive at the property, which is in the middle of nowhere. Once we realised the town location was where we should have met the owner, who would have taken us to the villa, we tried to contact him through the AirBnB app, but there was no signal around the house so we had to ring and then text him to make contact. He turned up 10 minutes later luckily, gave Mark the tour of the house and all its workings, then left us to it. We decamped our stuff from the van, which is parked 100m away, had a beer and went for a walk up a very steep path to the village, which was positively medieval, in search of the bar the owner said was up there. It was not worth the visit, the owner was very vocal and the only thing we understood was “Englasi bastardo touristo filth” or something similar, so we got the message it was not for us. We walked back down and visited the local waterfall, with a drop of about 5 metres, before going back to the house to cook tea. We are now sitting on the terrace, enjoying a GnT. 

We plan to go to the Cinque Terre tomorrow.  The region has over 200 castles so the rest of the week will be taken up visiting those locally, as well as hopefully driving to see Luca and Pisa. Jane is desperate to do the corny “holding up the tower” picture apparently.