Europe Trip 5 : Cinque Terre, Italy

Cinque Terre 1

Cute little town. Or rather I should say, cute little towns. The people here have been pretty nice, even though the place is crawling with tourists. We arrived a day early, so we really didn’t have a place to stay. After much walking up hills with my 45 lbs backpack, we were able to find a place. Granted, it’s just a person’s extra bedroom that has been converted into a hotel room, but at least it’s big.

Tomorrow Ems had planned for us to go hike to the next town, but I’ve been unable to work for so long, that’s all that’s been on my mind. I plan to just relax and do some work in the morning. Then when they get back, we can go to the beach and all that.

We had a really early dinner tonight. We just found a random place that had pizzas, calzones, and some other stuff. The bruschetta was pretty good and it came in three flavors. The traditional tomato, pesto, and anchovy. The anchovy version I could have done without. Way too salty. Actually, the pizzas and calzones were a little salty too. I can’t wait to try out the place in Rome that Alex recommended.

I’ve been good about shopping. It’s been around 10 days since I left San Diego and my backpack still weighs about the same. I plan to buy some monster sized luggage in Rome so I can shop till I drop. Well, maybe not that much, but if there is a nice Italian suit for a good price, I should probably get it.

I miss you guys in SD!

Cinque Terre 2

I woke up early on day 2 and got some work done in the morning. This led to me feeling pretty good and so I went with Emily and Wilson on the hike. The hike from Monterosso to the next town was around 1.5 hours. The first stretch was pretty much all stairs and uphill, so it was pretty tough. I was already completely drenched in sweat when we hit the flatter trails. We had lunch at the second town, Vernazza and visited the tower there. The people said that the hike from Vernazza to Cornelia was shorter than the first hike, so we were off. Lies. It was also around 1.5 hours. We decided we had gone this far, we might as well just hike to the last town.

We got there just as the sun was setting. Perfect timing. If we go left an hour later, it would have been pretty dark and dangerous. We took a train back to the first town and freshened up. Having completed this goal, we wanted to go to a nicer restaurant to treat ourselves. We found this one overlooking the beach and ordered up. It was quite disappointing. We have found that restaurants off the main streets are almost always better and cheaper too!

We got some gelato and headed back to our hotel room for a little relaxation and Arrested Development on my laptop. Tomorrow we take the train towards Venice.

edit: Something I forgot to mention. As we were walking down this very narrow path with walls on either side of us, a snake (not pictured) fell from a bush and started slithering towards me! I did the manly thing and yelped like a little girl and backed up over Wilson. It kept coming towards me at full speed until it found an escape through a gate. Fun times.