We just got on our train to Rome. Its pretty fancy! Seats are really comfortable. They even recline! We got up around 8 am and had some breakfast and packed our bags and started walking towards the train station in Florence. The walk was pretty exhausting... We did not want to get up this morning at all because we had a very long day in Cinque Terre.
Yesterday morning we got up at 5:00 am and headed to the train station to leave at 6:10 a.m. We had a train connection in Le Spezia. We had to wait there for about an hour. Our next train finally arrived and we boarded it heading to Riomaggiore (the first of five towns of Cinque Terre we came to). Upon approaching the town we went through tunnel after tunnel and it seemed like we would never get out of them and then finally there was a break in the mountain! We had our first glimpse of the Mediterranean! It was beautiful! We knew then that we were almost there! After nearly four hours on the trains we finally arrived at 10:00 am. We got off the train and immediately started taking pictures. It was gorgeous!
We discovered quickly that we had to pay five euro a piece to hike the trail. That was sort of annoying to find out. We began up the steps and started off the trail with a gorgeous view. The trail between Riomaggiore and the Manorola is called Via dell'Amore ("Lover's Lane"). This was a great start to the trail because it was not steep and had spectacular views.
We took many pictures...it was beautiful.
The trail went through each of the five towns of Cinque Terre. Each segment had its own uniqueness. If we wanted to take a break at each town we could. We decided not to stop until we got to the town called Vernazza. This was the fourth of five towns. The trail was closed between the last two towns of Vernazza and Monterosso. We were told that this was the most challenging of the trails too. It was closed because of a landslide. They had gotten a lot of rain that May.
There were vineyards on the sides of the mountains and gorgeous flowers throughout the entire trail. I can't describe how beautiful this all was. It left me speechless. I'll put up some pictures of the hike before we got to Vernazza here...
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| The buildings were built right into the rock side! Crazy! |
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| Do you see the bee? |
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| Notice the ladders to get to the next level of the vineyard...literally straight up! |
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| We take this flag with us on all of our hiking trips. We write the date, name of the trail and how many miles it was on the flag |
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| The town you see here is Vernazza. The town in the distance that the boat is headed is Monterosso. |
When we finally made it down the steps into the town of Vernazza there was a pizzeria right in front of us. We were both thinking the same thing. We chugged some water and had some great pizza for lunch. We then tried to find Nate some swim trunks and that went badly. We found some nice trunks but they wouldn't let him try them on. They were his size but when he put them on in the next town (after we took the water ferry across the water way) they did not fit at all. They were incredibly tight. And he had paid quite a bit for them... We were both extremely mad about this.
When we were in Vernazza we sat out on some rocks and watched the waves crash against the rocks. There were people climbing up onto the tall rocks and jumping off into the water. Maybe 15-20 feet up.
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| Notice the girl jumping off the rock |
We bought a ferry ticket and fought the crowd to get on the boat. It was really neat to use each of the three only ways to travel between town to town - train, hike and ferry.
The next town had a great beach that we wanted to go to. We were in for a surprise! The beach was covered in pebbles! It was pretty difficult to walk on, and really uncomfortable to lay on. We also forgot towels so I used my jacket to sit on and back pack to lean against. Nate wanted to get in the water but when he went to put his feet in he quickly reconsidered. It was freezing!!! He finally got the courage to get in when he saw there were elderly women in the water up to their neck. I finally got the courage to go in myself. It took me a good while though. It really was extremely cold. I stayed in as long as I could but the sun kept getting covered by the clouds and it was getting colder by the minute. It was also getting close to 5-6 p.m. I got out at one point because I was so cold and we were having to air dry. Nate wanted me to get back in the water but I refused. Finally I thought..."how many times do I get to swim in the Mediterranean with my husband?" So...I got back in again!!
We finally dried off and relaxed on the beach a bit before changing again and heading up to town for dinner.
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| Some of their vehicles are TINY!!! I just don't understand! There's no way Nate could fit in this thing |
We both had lasagna (which wasn't very impressive) while we sat at this restaurant with spectacular views of the mountains and the sea. It finally was time for our train to arrive and we departed for Florence again.
We tried so hard not to fall asleep but we did anyway! We had one connection to make and then it was straight to Florence. We got back at like 11:00 p.m. We had a tiring walk back to the hotel from the train station but when we got back to the room we took showers and immediately fell asleep.
We had to get to our train the next morning at 10:00 a.m. to head to Rome. We did the "duffle shuffle" from our hotel to the train station which pretty much sucked but a taxi would've been 10 Euro so we were ok with it.
We got to our train just fine and it was really nice. A man sat beside Nate who was with his wife and daughter. We talked with him for awhile on our ride. They were from California. It made our trip go by pretty quickly. Before we knew it we were at Roma Termini.
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