May 12 - Portofino

Today was another trip down memory lane.  We came here on a couple of cruises and the last time we bought and had shipped home four little paintings I have hanging in my foyer.  I remember we had lunch at a waterfront café and it took forever for our lunch to come so I wasn’t keen on going there again.  I did want to see the art gallery where we bought our treasures.  Unfortunately, there’s now a designer store of some kind in that spot.  That’s okay I guess because I wasn’t going to buy something anyway. 

Portofino is a beautiful little place built around a sheltered small boat harbor.  On the surrounding hillsides there are a castle, a church and a lighthouse you can hike up to on one side and on the others there are houses and some hotels.  This is a favorite place for some of the rich and famous and many of the shops around the little downtown area cater to those visitors.  It’s actually a little funny because mixed in between the Louis Vuitton and Dior stores you can find a store which sells what Al used to call tourist trash and trinkets.  As with most of these places the streets are primarily cobblestones which are hard on one’s feet.  I’ve been very lucky that it hasn’t been raining because if it had I wouldn’t have ventured out.  Cobblestones can be very slippery!

Not a bad little house

I walked around the waterfront and up a couple of the side streets leading to the harbor.  Along the way I took way too many pictures and I did look into a couple of shops.  I didn’t see anything that caught my eye; I’m not a Dolce & Gabbana kind of girl. I found a table right by the water’s edge at one of the many cafés there and had lunch.  I ordered a focaccia sandwich with mozzarella and tomato and an aperol spritz.  The spritz was good but the sandwich was really blah.  I don’t know how you can mess up something that simple, but they did.  The saving grace of the meal was dessert.  This place made its own gelato and I had some of the darkest dark chocolate gelato I’ve ever had and that was fantastic!

This pair swam by as I was eating. I should have fed them the focaccia. They would have liked it more than I did.

When I was finished I wandered back to the other side of the boat harbor and caught the tender to go back to my ship.  The ride wasn’t nearly as rough as yesterday’s which I think everyone was grateful for.  Back on the ship it was nearly trivia time (we’re still in the lead). I had dinner with a lovely couple I’ve met most nights at the piano bar before dinner.  The evening show was a performance by a great pianist who played a wonderful selection of pieces.  Late night visits to the Club (where the music was terrible) and the Observation Bar topped off my day.  In other words nothing really exciting happened today.  It was a relaxing  cruise day. The next two will be the same because I'm not planning to get off the ship.  Tomorrow we're stopping in Corsica (third time  just on this cruise) and the last day we'll be back in Sardinia.  They are both different towns but they offer pretty much the same things.