“What’s going through your mind? You have an odd expression on your face.” I was sure I did, but there was no way in hell I was going to tell him what I’d been thinking.

“Just thinking about the last time I had Limoncello.” Liar! “It was in the Cinque Terre—Riomaggiore—and I’d just finished hiking the whole thing.”

Okay, so that wasn’t a lie. I did do that, and I did celebrate with a glass of Limoncello at the end before I got on a train back to Monte Rosso where I was staying. This was years ago, when the track was open the whole way, before the landslides. I was travelling with a not-so-serious boyfriend, who I omitted from the story.

“Really? Now, that’s somewhere I would love to go,” James said.

“You’ve never been?”

“Sarah, this may surprise you, but there are many, many places in the world I’ve never been to.” Intrepid Sarah perked right up at the thought of travelling somewhere with James and being the experienced traveller, the one showing him the way. “Did you do the whole trek in one day?” he added.

“We did!” Uh oh. Intrepid Sarah forgot to omit the ex-boyfriend from the story. “I was there with an old boyfriend. Uh, sorry, not that he was old, I mean, it was … he was a boyfriend from a long time ago.” Oh crap, does he think that I think he’s old? “Not that I think you’re …” I trailed off, mortified, and he graciously chuckled, rescuing me from digging myself into a deeper hole.

“I understand. Anyway, so you did accomplish the whole trek in a day?”

Relieved, I got back to the story. “Yes! And we did this fun thing where we stopped at each town for a bite to eat or something to drink. First was morning tea, then lunch, then afternoon tea, and at the end, the Limoncello. It’s over thirty kilometres and there are a lot of stairs, so it was a massive day, but just phenomenal.

“You’d come around a bend and there would be another town, nestled into the cliffside, these arrays of pastels and primary colours—just gorgeous. And there were so many farms along the way—we’d meet up with people working on their terraced crops. ‘Buongiorno’, a little wave, and we’d keep going.

“We also saw quite a few people doing the trek in reverse order—the same thing, ‘Buongiorno’ as we passed. It was only when we got to Corniglia, the middle town, that I felt sorry for anyone doing the trek north. They’d had to walk up these ridiculous stairs just south of Corniglia—thirty flights, maybe three hundred and fifty stairs in all.”

“I didn’t realise.” A small smiled curled at the corners of his mouth.

“Yes, just brutal, whereas we got to walk down them. Actually, I felt even more sorry for the people who arrived on the train to stay in Corniglia, especially if they had luggage. Imagine carrying your bags up all those stairs from the train station. It made me glad we’d chosen to stay in Monte Rosso. Also, because it had an actual beach—it’s the only town that does.” Am I rambling? For the love of limoncello, stop rambling, Sarah!