Another vacation, another story of luck for Modesto couple in mudslide ordeal

Fred Miller, a Modesto Realtor, is one lucky man.

In his younger years, he was stuck in an early snowstorm in the Sierra without a tent and also was in a car that became wrapped around a telephone pole. In 2008, The Bee told of his near-death experience while boogie boarding in Pismo. He escaped drowning or becoming a quadriplegic, thanks to a series of "small miracles."

In October, Fred and his wife, Leanne, visited the Cinque Terra area of Italy, a quaint, historic area with five small villages on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Above each village, the hillsides are terraced for the grapes or olive trees grown there. Trains and 1,500-year-old hiking trails connect each town, where most cars are prohibited.

In a Gilligan's Island-like tale, the Millers left their hotel room in Vernazza one day for a morning hike and didn't return for eight days.

It happened like this:

The Millers arrived in the quaint town on an overcast Monday afternoon. They explored the main street and "ate the best salami we'd ever had in our lives," Fred said, "with cheese and bread on a porch overlooking the ocean.

"The next morning, it had been raining all night, but we wanted to get out. We bundled up and took the train down to Riomaggiore, the furthest village. We started our walk; the trail was cut into the rock cliff about 50 feet above the ocean."

The Millers easily walked to the second town, Manarola, and decided to take the train to the third town, Corniglia, which was the town before Vernazza. The fifth town, Monterosso, was beyond that.

In Corniglia, they walked from the station to the village, but "it started raining in buckets," Fred said. "I looked up at the steep hillside and saw one of two thick palm trees just snap off and blow down the hill. We decided we'd take the three-minute train ride to our village and warm up."

After they'd been sitting on the train for about 45 minutes, they asked the conductor about the delay. He said officials feared there was water in the tunnel between the towns and offered to put passengers on a bus to the next two villages.

"We figured, short ride, we had nothing to do anyway and it might be fun to see the countryside," Fred said.

Mudslide forces hike

But about a mile up the road, the bus driver stopped because of a mudslide. He told the people they would have to walk from there. The ones with luggage went back to the station. The Millers and seven others decided to walk to the villages.

"It had quit raining," Fred said. "We figured it could only be two to three miles. It might be a nice walk."

They first walked through the mudslide, which had brush and some tree limbs in it.

The group wasn't really together at that point. Later, they found they had two men from France who spoke no English, an older woman from Singapore and her 29-year-old daughter, a young man from Taiwan who spoke broken English and a couple in their 30s from Michigan. The Michigan pair were dressed for warmer weather and were overweight, so a hike in the cold rain was a challenge for them, Fred said. No one in the group knew how challenging: The man was blind, something the others didn't discover until the end of their adventure.

Four and a half hours later, the group had trudged constantly uphill and in the rain, which began coming down harder, and through at least four more mudslides, some of them more than knee deep. The roads were turning into streams. The steep hillside to their left was covered with iron mesh holding back mud and boulders. A sharp dropoff was on their right.