Portofino Italy
Originally uploaded by Transit Nerds

The Disney / Pixar animated film “Cars 2″ has some amazing graphics showing an imaginary car racing city of “Porto Corsa”. According to Wikipedia the animators created the city based partly on their drives around the coast of northern Italy in Liguria and especially the city of Portofino, located on the Mediterreanean Coast just north of the Cinque Terre, an area we blogged about in 2010 during the family train adventures throughout Europe.

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Vernazza (Cinque Terre – Italy)

Originally uploaded by fede0253

Vernazza is one of the five cities of Cinque Terre Italy, where we’ll be in about 3 weeks during the European Rail Adventure. It’s hard to find anybody who *did not enjoy* their trip to Cinque Terre, and although I’m guessing that all the travelers are stressing the charm of the place I’m confident this is still one of the world’s great travel destinations.

Thanks to TripAdvisor we’re finding a lot of nice “out of the way” places that have been reviewed by people or books but have not found their way into the major consolidators like Kayak or even Venere – the European equivalent of Expedia / Travelocity / Etc.

Thanks to www.Eurail.com for helping us make this dream trip possible!