Cinque Terre and the final weekend

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It's sort of late to be updating this, but it must be done. The weekend started with a trip to Florence. Part of the group did the obligatory David thing, and Melis and I did the leather market thing, having already seen the David. Then there was some Duomo action and some restaurant action (everyone else seemed to really like our restaurant but i ordered the bad dish). The next day we hit up the Ponte Veccia... wow I can't spell. Then the train took us to Cinque Terre. We had some dinner and did some relaxing, after the boys went to Pisa to see for sure that the tower really did lean, and then headed to bed. The hike was Saturday. It ended up being about 8 or 9 miles after our detours. We decided the normal trail wasn't hard enough and took a trail up the side of a mountain only to realize there is no way down other than our way up. So, although it was nice scenery and good exercise, we ended up where we started. We took the normal route, then, all the way to Monterosso. Doug had his first banana split along the way... that's always a good time. There was also the American Bar where they had a bunch of dollars on the walls with school names on them... all of our schools were already represented. The next day we went to Parma. My family is from there so it seemed like a cool place to go. However, we went on a Sunday so nothing was open. But we had a good meal and then headed home... I wish I could have found a phone book and phoned another Bilzi.

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