We're in La Spezia, which is the main Italian naval base. It has a whole three warships docked. This very stop was the main reason we chose to go on this cruise, so we could visit the famous cinque terre villages (hence the ferry, but there's also a train),
The villages are exceptionally picturesque, notwithstanding modern interruptions such as bridges and railway lines. They're not big, though, so they only take about an hour to look around at most.
The one we selected to stop at was Manarola. We could have walked from there to the next village in either direction, but when we landed my wife had seen the length of the queue for the ferry for the way back and decided she didn't want to risk missing it. As a result, we weren't there for much more than an hour anyway. That was still enough time to spot an excursion from the same cruise we're on. There must have been close to 50 people in the group, of whom only the front four would have been able to hear the tour guide. I don't know how many of those four would have been able to understand her.
We caught the ferry back, which did not run the advertised "every hour". It also didn't stop at La Spezia, we had to change at Porto Venere (I don't think it gave it name to the desease). We had to wait another hour for the ferry from there to La Spezia, so we had a look around. Apart from the sightesm we encountered two more excursion groups from our cruise. One of the guides pointed out an ice cream shop and told everyone how good it was, then kept on walking, I hope he gave them some free time, or that would have been cruel.
We're back on the ship now.I can use my phone as a hotspot to access the Internet, but that's only if my phone has a signal. It does at the moment, but it comes and goes. I doubt I'll have enough bandwidth to watch the European Championship final tomorrow evening. I guess the ship could show it somewhere, but it sailed from Barcelona so there'll be more Spain fans than England fans. It's bad enough that we're likely to lose, but seeing the rival fans gleefully celebrating would make a loss even tougher to take.
Maybe I'll wait for the report on BBC World news. That will make it less painful,
Oh, this photo is of Rio Maggiore, which we didn't get off at but the ferry made it easier to photograph than Manarola,
As you can see, it's pretty pretty pretty.