
Dec 17, 2011
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.

May 11, 2010
Travelling around Europe on a Eurail Pass is definitely cool, but it also requires more than a little planning if you want to maintain any sort of schedule. With the family of four on the trip I want to have reservations for trains and lodging along the way, but this creates some flexibility challenges since we are fixing a lot of dates.
Very helpful in determining specific train times and schedules is the magnificent German train website
Bahn.com . Another site with Europe-wide schedules is
Austrian Rail. However even with these powerful tools it’s tricky to match up the more frequent trains in and out of Chur and Lugano with with the Alps magnificent Bernina Express, which itself is not a simple single line but basically goes between Chur / Davos / or St Moritz Switzerland to Tirano, Italy and then on in summer by bus to Lugano, Italy. Confused? Here’s the
Bernina Express site. This is one of the world’s great train rides and it’s included in the Eurail Pass.
Note: Eurail Pass has helped to sponsor of our European family blogging adventure. Thanks Eurail Pass!