So, that last post was about holding my nose and signing up for a “group experience,” then, well, really enjoying it. So I decided to roll the dice again. My daughter had taken a side trip to the very-touristy-looking-to-me coastal villages of Cinque Terre with her girlfriend’s family this past spring during a whirl through Italy, and she felt strongly that I should try to see them.

Cinque Terre – yeah, you’ve all seen the pictures of little brightly-colored cubes of homes piled impossibly steeply on cliff faces dropping down to the sea. They hang the posters in travel agencies side by side, as a counterpoint, to the stark white ones from Santorini.

Alas, getting to Cinque Terre looked to require a few changes of trains, and a national park pass, and not a lot of information on how to actually do the “visiting” thing once you got there, so I was going to let it slide.

Until, damn it, that “Thank you for booking an experience with our massive agglomerator and here are more things you might want to try” email dropped in my inbox. And number one on the list was a bus ride out to Cinque Terre for a day hike, boat ride, and sampling of local Ligurian delicacies, starting at 7:30 the next morning.

Okay, my last experience with actual group travel began with a traumatizing ride in the back of an overstuffed bus down to Bruny Island constantly barraged by insipid, overmodulated commentary from an earnest but callow young lady who finished every sentence with “Isn’t that soooo cool?” (“You should definitely eat wallaby while you’re here. Did you know that wallaby has the lowest fat and highest level of antioxidants of any meat anywhere? That’s sooo cool, isn’t it?”). And it went downhill from there.

But a day hike promised a chance to get away from a potentially noxious tour guide if need be, and seemed aimed at a perhaps more active audience. Oh heck, how bad could it be?

It was, uh, pretty danged awesome. Damn it.

A note about aggregators like Viator and AirBnB: you can often cruise them for interesting ideas and then, if you see something you like, Google the exact tour name. It seems to pretty reliably pick up the tour company in question, which lets you find out a whole lot more about them and their offerings. Plus, if you book directly, it may not be cheaper, but at least the folks who do all the actual work get all the money from the booking.

So, these were the guys I signed up with. I’m going to skip trying to do a full narrative here and just throw down a photo dump:

Manarola

Tasty bites.

Above the entrance to the cemetery in Manarola:
Oh, Ligurian cemeteries, open to the wind and waves,
A rosy sadness colors you when, in the evening,
Like a flower that wilts and fades,
The great light falls and dies.