Today we slept in a little longer than any of the past few mornings, I got up about 7:30 AM and worked on yesterday’s blog post while Stephanie slept in until about 9:00 AM. We both needed a little respite from the early wake-up times and rigors of travel over the past few days.
The plan for today was to try and figure out if we could get Stephanie’s phone repaired in La Spezia, a small town located about 30 minutes south of here by train. There is a Samsung repair facility there and Stephanie had been communicating with them via Facebook Messenger. Unfortunately, we had not heard back from them since Saturday, so we tried calling them on my phone. Stephanie talked with a person there who could not speak much English, so we were not sure if we needed to go there or not, or if they could even fix the broken screen.
Stephanie went to ask our hotel receptionist if she could call them to try and get more detailed information from them since she obviously speaks Italian. The small office for the staff is right next to our room. In the end, the repair facility was not sure if the parts would fit without us going there and have them take apart the phone. We already knew one repair facility had said the parts were not interchangeable between USA phones and European phones, so we decided it was not worth the effort to go there with that much doubt. We also knew that if something inside the phone was damaged, that the internal parts are definitely not compatible because of the different cell phone systems in the two countries.
We will just wait an see if we can find a repair facility in Florence, it is much more likely to cater to USA phone repairs because of the large number of tourist that go there. Or, we may try to find a facility in Rome online just to see if we can figure out the compatibility issue once and for all. Someone in Italy must have had to work on a USA cell phone before, especially one as old as an S8+. For the short term, we are done with searching for a phone repair facility.
It was now about 12:15 PM, so we headed out to get some lunch. We knew we wanted to try one of the shorter trail hikes today, so we took all of our gear with us so we could go directly from lunch. This is a hilly village, and everything is uphill from our room since it is down by the sea. We did not want to backtrack any more than necessary.
We found a small restaurant that served something other than ham and cheese sandwiches, they had a pork sandwich that was heated, and we got one to split since it was pretty large. They also specialized in fried seafood “cones” where they served the fried seafood mixture in a cardboard cone. Stephanie asked the lady serving us if they had calamari, and they did, and she gave us a freshly fried sample with our sandwich The calamari was pretty good, but a little greasy.
After we ate our lunch outside on a bench on the main street, we headed up to the top of the town to find the beginning of the trail we planned to hike today. It was called the “Ring of Riomaggiore”, and it went to the top of the hillside to the Sanctuary of Montenero, a Catholic Church. It was a 2.2 mile hike, labeled as “easy”. The total vertical climb was about 1115 feet. We went inside a store to purchase a map of the hiking trails, just to make sure we were going to the correct trailhead. The map seemed a little too detailed and too large of scale to help out much, it was for the entire Cinque Terre area.
Using both the map and some information I had downloaded before the trip, we found the beginning of the trail and headed upward, and upward, and upward, and upward,……OK so you get it, it was all uphill on a fairly rocky trail. It had been suggested to hike in this direction, which would put us going clockwise, due to the amount of steps at the beginning of the trail if we went in the other direction. Total time for the entire hike was supposed to be one hour, twenty minutes.
OK, before we get into details, the person giving that timeframe must be an avid hiker that is twenty years old, it was not “easy” and it was not that short of duration. We were hiking right along thinking we would be to the church soon, but it took us about an hour and ten minutes just to get to the church. Of course we stopped for photos along the way, which were really rest breaks.
On the way up, probably about halfway to the church, we met a couple from Baltimore who had come up in the opposite direction, doing the dreaded steps uphill first instead of the recommended direction where they were downhill at the end. They strongly suggested that we come back down the way we were going up instead of doing the “circle” as we had planned to do. They said the steps on the other end of the trail were brutal, narrow, and very irregular in height.
We took that into consideration as we continued our climb to the top. After what seemed like hours, we finally made it to the top and found the Church, taking much longer to get there than had been “suggested”. We had almost done the climb up to the church in the suggested total round trip time, and we were hot, sweaty, and tired. It was fortunate that the sun was not out for the entire uphill assault, we were already sweating enough in the overcast weather. Thankfully, we had brought along a sufficient amount of drinking water.
The Church was closed and all barricaded up for some reason, apparently it is open sometimes for visitors, but not today. It is more likely open in the summer season, or possibly on different days of the week, but not today.
It was a beautiful vantage point high above Riomaggiore, and we spent quite a lot of time taking photos. The sun had finally come out and the skies were clear. We had lugged up all the gear for taking tripod photos, so we knew we had to take some photos of us while we were at the top. In order to get enough camera height to have the town of Riomaggiore in the background of the photos, we moved a couple of benches together that were on the church grounds, and set the tripod/camera on top of those to get more of a downhill angle.
We took a few photos of ourselves, and then put away the camera gear to begin the descent back to Riomaggiore. We knew there was a cemetery near the bottom that we wanted to see if we took the recommended circle route down, and so we did not backtrack to take the same trail we used for the ascent. That meant we were going to be taking the dreaded “steps” down.
OK, it was really rough and took us a lot longer than the estimated “twenty minute” duration for the descent back onto Riomaggiore from the church. It was more like an hour. The steps were slippery from yesterday’s rain, and not really steps at all, just rocky ledges, and they were very irregular in height. It was just tough on our knees and thighs going down, and it seemed to take forever. There were some good photo stops (really rest breaks) on the way down, and we went through a lot of vineyards and olive groves growing on the sides of the hills, which is really why the trails exist to begin with, to access these farms.
Part of the way down was on a road, so that was a little easier, but the road just got us to another section of steep steps. Eventually, we made it to the cemetery, which was more like a mausoleum or columbarium, no graves were in the ground, everyone was interred in small vaults in a very large marble structure. Some were quite old, we could read the information and dates on some of the vaults that were near the perimeter fence.
We finally made it to the bottom of the trail, which ended up being a lot farther down into town that where we had started. Steps can certainly be hard going up, but for us, it was worse going down. We know we will not be able to do this type of strenuous hiking on many more vacations, this may be our last venture into the hills of Cinque Terre unless we get into much better climbing shape before we do it again. However, we did get some satisfaction in knowing we had completed the hike.
We headed back to the room to try and re-hydrate, we had taken enough water, but knew we needed more. It had been sunny the entire climb down, and we were really sweaty.
Since it was such a nice sunny day, we decided to do a little more laundry, washing some shirts this time. We did the wash in the sink, and then hung the clothes on the revolving clothes lines that are on the building outside of our window. Luckily, we had brought our own clothes pins knowing we needed to hang up clothes at some point during the trip. We really felt Italian hanging up our clothes outside of the building like the locals.
We rested a bit, drank a lot of water, and eventually opened a bottle of wine to have while the clothes dried. We let the clothes hang outside about 90 minutes before we opted to take them down and let them finish drying inside. We did not want to leave them unattended in case the wind got stronger and blew them down, we did not want to go hunting for our clothes on the street several floors below.
Once we pulled in our clothes to finish drying inside, we went out to walk around the harbor and enjoy the weather. It was a pleasant 70 degrees outside, but felt warmer in the sunshine. This was probably the sunniest day of the trip so far, once the clouds had burned off around 2:00 PM. We went to the grocery and purchased some white wine so that we could try and get it cold in our refrigerator before sunset. Our plan was to go to the rocky beach here in Riomaggiore and enjoy the sunset with some wine like we had done when we were first here in 2010.
We headed to the grocery for the white wine, and found some Pinot Grigio, our favorite hot day white wine. We also purchased some bananas for breakfast tomorrow, and then took all of that back to the room so we could chill down the wine in our mini fridge/freezer.
We headed back outside and just hung out by the waterfront on some rocks while the wine was chilling, and while we waited for sunset at 7:16 PM. We just sat and enjoyed the waves crashing against the harbor jetty rocks for about thirty minutes, and then went to get the almost chilled wine and camera gear for the sunset viewing at the rocky beach.
The sunset was nice, it was a little cloudy on the horizon, so it was not as spectacular as we wished, but we took a lot of photos and enjoyed the sunset, remembering our last time here. It was getting dark, and we needed to go because the beach is so rocky. It is not small pebbles, it is large rounded rocks that are actually really hard to walk on, even worse in the dark.
We went back to the room and dropped off all of our gear before heading out to find some dinner. We looked at several restaurant menus before deciding on one that looked good, fairly high up the hill from our room, the Veciu Muin.
It turned out to be a great choice. We got a nice table in their outside covered dining area, I had gnocchi with a gorgonzola cream sauce, and Stephanie had a spicy spaghetti with black olives mixed in. We ordered a bottle of the house red wine, which was really good, and they served bread. It was a relaxing and enjoyable meal, we both enjoyed our dinner choices.
After dinner, we headed back to the room, tired and sore from our hiking adventure. It was about 9:45 PM, and I worked on the blog while Stephanie read her Facebook and rested.
Tomorrow, if we can walk, we plan on another hike, this one a little less aggressive, the “blue” trail between Monterosso and Vernazza, which we also did last time we were here.
We both turned in at about 10:30 PM.