Blogs from Cinque Terre, Liguria, Italy, Europe - page 7

I board the train knowing that today would be a very busy and tiring day, but one I am eagerly anticipating. Today I will walk, or attempt to walk the Cinque Terre trail. The Cinque Terre is a rugged portion of coast on the Italian Riviera. "The Five Lands" is composed of five villages: Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore. The coastline, the five villages, and the surrounding hillsides are all part of the national park. The entire area is around eight miles long, while the average distance between neighboring villages is two miles. I arrive from the train in Riomaggiore. My first task was to find my hostel. I follow the instructions and I go up this long hilly street. I have my large backpack on my back at this time, and this ... read more

We woke up as normal, everyone had a good night sleep. Well not really, I did but Kirsten doesn’t like the hard European beds. She prefers a pillow soft bed. We stayed a nice hotel, mostly business people. So when I walk in wearing shorts & sandals a few eyebrows were raised. Sort of like whenever I told Carryl something he didn’t want to hear. Oh how I miss those days, NOT! So when Kirsten and Bea come in and sat down with me they start starring at me. LOL. Ok, somewhere between last night and this morning we decided to go to the Cinque Terre, it means 5 Towns. Paths connect them. This area as you remember is one of my bucket list items. Kirsten & I walked it 4 years earlier. Someday I hope ... read more

Cinque Terre Part 2 Day four By day four I had to say goodbye to Shannon and Sarah who were off to Florence so Olivia and Addie, the other American girls, and I all headed to the only other breakfast bar to have a group brunch before we all went our seperate ways for the day. Afterwards I caught the train to Monterosso to see the fifth and final village, wandered the length of the beach to both ends before finding a small piece of black sand to lie down on my towel and read my book, after an hour I was drenched as the non reflective black sand was far too hot and the whole experience was unpleasant (my book was also dodgy, I don't get the hype about 50 shades of grey...it is badly ... read more

Alarm goes off 5:45, we grab showers, but still groggy, needing coffee, and stiff from a restless night, we trudge to the meeting point for our tour (with time to grab a very strong, but very tiny cup of espresso). I'm really second guessing myself at this piont, thinking I should have allowed more time in the U.K. and maybe skipped Italy all together, atleast until our Rome trip. But I also really wanted to see Venice, so I just waited to see what the day held in store for us. We had a full tour bus, with our guide Eddy who did speak English but very heavily accented, and there was one other American couple on the tour with more Australians than any other country. So we head into the Italian countryside, passing through several ... read more

Tuesday 19th June 2012 – Monterosso al Mere Today, after a leisurely breakfast, we caught the ferry from Monterosso to Riomaggiore – a 40 minute trip to the southern-most town of the five towns that make up the Cinque Terre (five towns) . Along the way, we stopped at 3 others of the townships (the middle town doesn’t have a mooring for the ferries). We had a lovely lunch in a restaurant in the town, and then walked approximately 20 minutes north to the next town of Manarola in time to catch the ferry back to Monterosso for an early dinner, and back to the hotel for a relaxing evening – that word seems to keep cropping up in our conversations – “relaxing” – it sure is! We decided not to do the approximately 8-hour walk ... read more