The Chugg Family: Portofino Italy

Ever since the Romans founded Portofino for its safe harbor, it has been appreciated by many including: Napoleon down to the Nazis. In the 1950's, National Geographic highlighted Porofino's port and that is when the locals claim that Hollywood's elite crowd took note. Famous fans include Liz Taylor and Richard Burton and then later Liz Taylor and Eddie Fischer. (How many times did she wed??) It is even said that Greta Garbo liked to swim naked in the harbor not knowing that half of the town was watching. Lovely. We opted to stay clothed and not get into the harbor.... maybe this is why we never made it big in Hollywood. Rick Steves Italy 2011 pg. 405

Driving to Portofino (the port was in Savona), we had what you would call our first "Whammie" during any of our vacations. We had rented two vehicles and were caravaning. We made a wrong turn and exited before we were supposed to. Then the first car turned around to go get back on the freeway, and the second car (poor Brian the driver) was going to turn around when out of nowhere, an italian on a scooter came up on his left side, tries to cut Brian off and veer back into traffic, and wham Brian hit him. Ughhh!!! Terri his wife took care of the token swearing for the situation and the rest of us kind of watched as the Italian guy spun off his scooter and started yelling at Brian everything he could think of in Italian that would be offensive if we knew what he was saying. Brian rolled the window down and said a simple, but profound "sorry". Chris and Doug hopped out and tried to deal with the guy. Chris surveyed the damage....only a little scratch.....but took some time so as not to down play it to the italian and then simply offered him 20 euro. That made him perk right up, hop on his scooter and get on his way which is exactly what we were all hoping for. Phewwwww.....it could have been so much worse!! No scratch on the rental and nobody hurt.

Portofino proved to be a very fun and colorful port with lots of greenery. It was amazingly beautiful and we enjoyed our first Italian stop.

This little hike up the mountain side led to a really cool old italian villa mansion built up on it. We paid a few euro each to go inside and see it first hand.

The inside had a lot of neat arches mixed with simple lines and a lot of rod iron thrown in. I loved it!

We headed back to the town to find some pizza at one of the local restaraunts for lunch. We ordered hot chocolate too. After one sip of the hot chocolate and I knew it was lacking something. Sugar and a lot of it. Once we doctored it up it was good but wow was it bitter to start out.

The pizza was good, but kind of plain. And it seems to be missing a lot of cheese! American pizza has a lot of cheese on it and we really use a lot of more garlic salt and seasonings.