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Day 1 – Cinque Terre
I found a quiet parking lot on a service station on the motorway just a few kilometres away from La Spezia. No trucks here what meant no heavy engines running all night and keeping you awake with their noise. Instead a heavy thunderstorm that woke me up in the middle off the night but was completely gone the next morning, which greeted me with bright sunshine.
The coastal mountain range here is pretty high, the summits were snow covered. The flanks of these mountains are also steep and meet the Mediterranean Sea in a very abrupt way. The motorway running through this area and following the coastline is an engineering masterpiece, consisting to a large part of tunnels and bridges and an endless succession of curves. It is also a challenge to drive as it was built a few decades ago when cars and trucks were smaller. This morning traffic was low and I reached the exit in an easy drive. The exit was another wild construction of a bridge doing two 180 degree turns in sharp curves within not more than 200 metres.
The following country road was – surprise! – curvy again and narrow until it disappeared in a long tunnel. That tunnel opened into another narrow valley that soon allowed first glimpses of the sea. I passed a cliff with a picturesque town on top of it in another 180 degree turn from where I had the first view of my destination.
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