Hallo adventure, we have been waiting for you!
Wow, it has been too long time... our last trip supposed to be to Venice, but because of the bad weather and other small reasons, it was cancelled. So now we have been grounded for about 8 month already. My toes have been already itching for travelling :)
We have been in Italy before, but manely in near Milan and Venice area. This time we decided to rent a car and drive to see Cinque Terra with kids. It is about 350km from Malpensa airport, but as we arrived on left on Sunday, there was more or less normal traffic. We used toll roads and to get to La Spieza area cost us ca 22€, but is was well worth it. Driving was fast and roads were in good shape.
We hired car from Goldcar and I think that the price was really a bargain - 200€ for 7 days with full insurance. We got small Lancia Ypsilon and even though we were skeptic at the beginning, it served us well.
We stayed in beautiful old town called Ameglia. My gosh - it was like in history movie and I was like a noble princess :) The house was about 300y old I think and part of the wall was actual stone from the cliff. The view from my bedroom was magnificent! We booked house through airbnb and it cost us only 275€ in total. If anybody needs a reference, I´m more than happy to help.
Ameglia was located only ca 20km from La Spieza - so it was really convinient location to explore the area.
Cinque Terre - I really took my breath away :) The nature in this part of Italy, wineyards, mountains, forrest, sea and all together was really breathtaking. Cinque Terre means actually 5 lands/cities hidden by mountains. Well not so much anymore, but they used to be.
There are many walking/hiking paths in this area, so we started with the one which starts from Monterosso to Vernazza. I read from the reviews, that it is quite steep and might be hard for older people and even though - I´m not old - it was hard for me too. The 600 steps up, went down again, and this is where my knees really started to hurt :/ But luckily when the warm-up was over and we headed back from Vernassa to Monterosso - I felt fine again :)
The path was ok, but nothing extraordinary + it was "toll road". For our family the cost was about 20€/day. It supposed to including wifi and toilets, but non of those I found on the way :) Plus even though we were there on October - it was stil overloaded with tourist. I don´t even want to imagine, how it is during summer.
But we really enjoyed little beach on Monterosso. It was stone beach, but stones were smooth :)
As we are budget travellers, I didn´t want to spend fortune on parking (in Cinque Terre the cost is aroun 2,5-3€/h). So in Monterosso we left our car on the mountain, just one turn before the city sign. Walking down to beach took around 10 min.
For our family - the absolute favourite path was the closed one, trail 531 for Riomaggiore to Manarola. First of all, ofcourse - parking. We left the car at the top of the mountain, before entetering to Riomaggiore. It was perfect location, because just there was path to city (marked with red/white/red flag). So you don´t have to take the driving road down, you can go through vineyards from stairs. Yess, approx. 20€ saved :)
The city athmosphare was totally different, than in Monterossa. I loved it. We ate expensive seafood and ice-cream and decided to walk to Manarola. Unfortunately - path by the sea is actually and really closed, so this we didn´t even try. But we found another one over the mountains, which supposed to be closed as well, but we were not stopped by the gate :) The views were really amazing and there was no traffic on the path - only us. The path was literally in the middle of vineyards, but unfortunately all grapes were overdone or harvested already. There were many notifications of the way, that it is closed and to be honest - some parts of this paths were quite difficult, because of the loose stones. So I can not recomment this :)
We had two beach days as well, which we spended on Lerici. I´m not so sure, that this is the best place, but it was ok for us. Again - we left teh car at the top of the mountain for free parking and headed down by foot. As it was october - the public beach was quite abandoned. But during the summer I think it is too crazy in there. In overall - small and beautiful, but quite boring city.
So all in all - those 7 days went so fast. We wined, dined (manely home) and our pizza craving really ended before the trip:)
Total cost of this vacation was 1400€ (car+airbnb+flight tickets+food+toll fees) + 500€ shopping (girls school clothes, boots, hiking bags for 4). I think we did good in budget wise :)
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