Sunny and warm
The weather is turning - you can feel the cooler weather coming on. And we both feel like we are getting a cold. Today we did nothing except get ready to leave. We went to the laundromat in town and did two loads of laundry to get us through the last week. Unfortunately, the washers do not let you add your own soap (we use unscented soap), but it is automatically added, and it was a little scented. It took a couple of hours to do the laundry, so we wandered around town and sat in Barolino having coffee and reading the paper while the clothes were washing and drying.
11 nights here and we have not even seen all of Levanto. We didn't go in the church. We didn't walk from Levanto north to the next town (can't remember the name now). We didn't drive inland from the Cinque Terre to Pignone. We didn't hike from Portovenere to Riomaggiore (5 hours with twice the climb of the Levanto to Monterosso hike). We didn't take the boat between the Cinque Terre towns. I can't remember what we did - when I count back through our activities I come up with two days of hiking and three day trips in the car. That leaves five days unaccounted for.
We spent the afternoon packing up and napping (to get rid of these colds). When we took some stuff out to the car, there was a parking spot on the street right in front of the hotel, so we moved the car from the lot where we had been keeping it and parked there. Easier for loading the car, but the street is narrow and although everyone parks along there, I don't think you are really supposed to and cars are always having to wait while oncoming cars take the corner. The lot that Federico uses while his parking area is being built is a block from the hotel, down a steep alley just a few feet then into a field that is fenced and gated.
We did a long walk around town in the early evening and got to Taverna Garibaldi just before it opened. I took some photos of the owners, Thomas and Elena, in the restaurant. I am going to make a page about them as an example pizza restaurant on SlowTrav. Thomas is going to email me their menu. I also took photos of the pizza we had for dinner. We both got pizzas with no cheese - which was perfect - nice and light for our last Levanto meal.
We had asked Federico where we could get organic olive oil locally and he had a friend, but it turned out the friend was out of town. Instead they gave us a few liters of their own olive oil (I guess they have land somewhere - a guy came in with the oil and with a basket of vegetables for them).
