Day 5 in Italy: Cinque Terre to Napoli (Saturday, July 3)

Today, I slept in until 9 AM, then we packed up and after a simple breakfast of toast and assorted leftovers from the night before, grabbed a shuttle to train station. Erin, Greg, Colleen and I did a little shopping in Vernazza (the fourth village) and then hopped the train back to the starting point, called La Spezia. There we met up with Amanda, Tim, and Haley who had decided to hike part of the way back to La Spezia. We had to wait an hour or so until our train left, so I grabbed a sandwich for the train in the station. The ship, which we had left in Civitavecchia, had sailed to Naples (Napoli) while we were in Cinque Terre. We elected not to travel with the ship, because we didn’t want to be committed to come back early. The train ride from northern Italy to the southern part, where Napoli is located was hot and crowded and long. In addition to no AC, everyone kept getting kicked out of our seats because we had a general ticket which did not assign us a specific seat. Grrr…it was a little frustrating but we were thrilled when we finally got off in Napoli. I think the trip was supposed to be about 6 hours long, but it took us like 7 and a half hours with all of the stops and delays (typical of the Italian train system, so I’m told!). Once we made it to Napoli, it was close to 11 PM and we were all beat. We grabbed a few cabs and found the ship where we grabbed some dinner at the snack bar on the seventh deck before crashing.