Here are a few things to know about Cinque Terre, and perhaps about Italy as a whole, if you are thinking about going there.

1. Monday is a better time to do most things than Sunday.   Yesterday when we buckled and bought the CinqueTerre cards so that we could walk on the Via di Amore, it cost a small fortune.  The man in the booth apologized to us, saying it was “Peak Season.”   I made a joke, saying I was doing it for love (because Via di Amore means “Lovers’ Lane” or something close to that).  I even managed to say my joke in Italian, and the man in the booth was mightily impressed.   Today, we found out it isn’t peak season anymore.

Mondays are apparently off-peak, and the admission to walk the paths was half of what it was

yesterday. Friends,  take it easy on Sunday in Cinque Terre.  Go to the beach or walk on one of the free trails.  Then go crazy on Monday.

2.  I’m not going to say that this place is a haven for smokers, but it is smoker friendly.  Maybe half of the people milling about, or maybe a third, seem to be smoking either an e-cigarette or an analog one.  Not in restaurants, mind you.  But in the streets.  Today while I was waiting outside the apartment on a nice bench they put there, a couple came by and they looked like they were in search of something.  I told them I had only been here a day, but I

might be able to help them.  They were looking for a trash reciptical.  I had to admit that the closest one I could think of was a few hundred meters away, near the beach.  But there were several cigarette receptacles within sight of where I was.  Jen even saw honest-to-goodness ash trays (remember those things?) in several souvenir stands.  It is possible that you can smoke in hotel rooms here, too.  Our apartment definitely had the scent of smokers.  It was like being back in the 80s.

3. It’s not actually super expensive here.  This is especially true on Mondays (see #1 above).  Our walk from Monterosso to Vernazza was absolutely worth the 7 euro per person we paid.  It was my third favorite hiking experience ever (after the Bright Angel Trail at the Grand Canyon’s South Rim and the Franconia Notch loop).  It was a strenuous two miles of absolute pleasure.  Honestly, it was worth the whole extravagance of getting here.  After a few hundred meters of climbing stairs with dozens of other tourists, things spread out and we were able to climb stairs pretty much in our group of four.

Eventually we started getting glimpses of the pink buildings or Vernazza.  We  began imagining ourselves under one of the multicolored umbrellas in the harbor-side piazza.  Soon enough we were there, eating lunch under one of those umbrellas.  From time to time we would look up into the hills above us and see the people we had passed on our way over, still making their way along the path.  It’s not totally that we’re fine specims of health — I mean, we’re not bad, but there were a lot of people much older than us on the trail, and it was not an easy trail.  Lots of stairs to climb along the way, and lots of twists and turns in the trail.  It was not as tricky as yesterday’s hike, where there were not dedicated steps and a lot of the rocks were covered in moss, making them slippery.  But it was not a total walk in the park, either.

In terms of expense, we ate lunch in a seaside resort, on the main piazza of what most people think is the most scenic of all the town in the Cinque Terre, and we paid about 85 euro for the four of us.  I think we would have paid a lot more in the US, and the food was better than it had to be, given the prime real estate.  We have found some nice value here.  A liter of sangria at a cafe right above the main Monterosso beach — 20 euro.  And they gave us snacks.  We ordered another round because we still had an hour before our train left.  That’s right, we were in a cafe five minutes from the train station, staring our at the Mediterranian Sea, and they didn’t really gouge us for booze.  That price includes the tip.  Did I mention that?

4. When you see the pictures of the sesaside villages here, you might notice that the buildings

are pretty close together, and as a consequence they tend to stretch upward for lack of being able to expand sideways.  This creates some interesting elements of interior design.

Our apartment is a prime example of maximizing vertical space — from the ship’s staircase you had to climb to get up to the main floor (our friend Eliza the mountain climber would have had a good time with that), to the loft where Nadia slept, it was not for the weak-kneed, but it was a very interesting space to inhabit for a few nights.  Perhaps the most treacherous part was getting to the bathroom, which required walking across the ship’s ladder at a space where the stairway’s risers did not match the floor level.  It was a potential cliff dive for someone waking up in the middle of the night needing to use the facilities.  The proprietors have installed a gate to block off this section to prevent sleepwalking injuries, and fortunately we did not have any injuries.

5. There are benefits to renting an apartment.  While our Air b’nb hostess apologized for not being able to help us with the lost luggage situation -(she had never dealt with a situation requiring a courrier to drive to the apartment, which is unaccessible to car traffic, arriving potentially at a moment’s notice — luckily, we figured it out), she was very gracious in letting us leave our luggage in her entryway after we checked out of the apartment and started our trek to Vernazza.  Later in the day, that entry way served as a changing room for Lanie and Jen as they got their bathing suits on.  That’s right! They went swimming in the Mediterranian Sea.  It was right between our lunch on the piazza and our seaside sangrias.

6. It is not difficult to get around.  We hopped on a train in Monterosso (You do have to be careful that you don’t get on the wrong train.  A lot of people who just wanted to go to the next town tried to get onto our train, which was going all the way to another part of Italy) and that bought us to Pisa.  There we changed trains, and fairly quickly (about three hours after we left Monterossa) we were in Florence.  Nadia walked us confidently out of the train station and to our new apartment, and then we found a great (and inexpensive) restaurant a block away from our front door.

7.  We have not really needed cash for anything here, except the “Tourist Tax,” which our hostess requested we leave in a basket on the kitchen table when we left. It was meant to be three euro per person per day we were in the CInque Terre — that’s 24 euro, if you are as  good at math as we are.  This out of pocket expense was reduced to 23 euro when I found a euro coin on the path up to the convent on the first evening we were in town.  Of course, because we had extra euros on hand, I wanted to give some of it away to the man who drove our suitcase all the way from Milan out to Monterosso over what must be a very twisty and dark road through the hills.  I gave him a 10 euro note as a tip, and he seemed very confused by it.  He said, “You are very…” but he couldn’t think of the word to explain a person who would randomly give him money, at least not a complimentary one and not in English.  Tiips are not standard here (see number 3 on this list); though most establishments have had tip jars near the register — they are hopeful, but usually empty.  I finished the sentence for him,  “We are very happy to have our luggage,” I said.  He took the money and hopefully bought himself a drink with it, though not until after he made it back over the hills.