Isola d'Elba

Elba was amazing. It's the island where mainly Italians and Germans go on vacation.

Our trip began on Friday morning when we went to the train station. We waited for our train to arrive with four other students from our school and the train wasn't there...and it was getting late. We asked someone who worked there only to find out that our train was a bus. And the bus was leaving. We ran through the station and caught the bus just in time. I don't know why in Italy train=bus, but so it does.

The bus ride was two hours through the Tuscan countryside, to the port of Piombino. There we caught a one-hour ferry to Portoferraio, which is on the north of Elba. The ferry ride was very nice - bright blue Mediterranean water and lots of little islands to look at.

Our hotel was in Innamorata, which is near Capoliveri. It is pretty far from Portoferraio, so instead of taking a taxi, we decided to rent 4 scooters (all over the place in Italy) and a Moke.

In case you don't know what a Moke is, picture a white Barbie jeep with no windows, roof, or doors. It is very small. And we loved it. It was a manual transmission, and Danielle was the only one of us who knew how to drive it (the others were driving scooters and Cristina and I were the others in the Moke). We drove that thing through the windy, scary roads in second gear (it took Danielle a while to find third). One of the scooter drivers had an accident but fortunately he was not hurt and his scooter was not very damaged. But we made it to our hotel, and it was worth the trek getting there.

Cristina, Danielle, and I shared a room, and Carla, Matt, Dana, and Nayef shared another room. Our room's deck overlooked the sea and we all agreed that this was the most beautiful place we had ever been to. And we all decided that we were going to come back.

The little resort we stayed at had its own beach, bar, restaurant, laundry facilities, and pool. The restaurant was surprisingly inexpensive, compared to Florence and in light of the fact that it was the only place to get food for a few miles.

On Saturday, after hanging around on the beach for a while, we celebrated Nayef's birthday with a trip to a restaurant in Capolivieri (complete with a Nutella birthday pizza for dessert) and then we chilled at a local bar. The bartender was great and we were there for a few hours. To show his appreciation and bring more business for this guy, Nayef kept going out into the street and calling passers-by into the bar, so by the time we left, it was crowded.

As opposed to Florence, which shuts down except for restaurants at 4 p.m., Capoliveri's shops were open until about midnight and so we also got a lot of shopping in. The people were all very nice (unlike Florence) and we were the only Americans around (also unlike Florence). None of us wanted to go back to Florence.

We left Sunday morning since the Moke needed to be returned by 11 a.m. The drive back was much better than the drive there. We posed in the Moke for a quick picture before saying goodbye. The 1-hour ferry ride back was uneventful, as was the two-hour bus ride back to Florence.

The scooter crew did not return with us, since their scooters were not due until the afternoon. However, they did not know that the last bus leaving Piombino was at 4 p.m. until we called and told them that at noon. They were unable to get a direct bus and ended up busing to a train station, then getting on a train FROM Pisa instead of TO Pisa (whoops) and were halfway to Rome before their tickets were checked. Then they spent a few hours in a random Italian town waiting for another train. They got back around 12:30 am (we didn't find out about this until the next morning, since they live in a different apartment than we do).

Cristina and I plan to return to Elba after school is over, since we have ten more days in Italy that we haven't planned yet. There is still stuff to see in Elba, like Napoleon's house (he was banished there once and escaped Elba - none of us know why he would want to leave), the black sand beaches (there is some minor volcanic activity on Elba), and the white "Florida" beaches.

Here are some pictures from our Elba weekend. If there are any red X's showing, try to click on it - it should open the photo - for some reason the blog isn't liking pictures today.