The third part of Italy we visited was Cinque Terre. Cinque Terre stands for "5 lands" and they are found along the coast of Italy. It took us 3 1/2 hours to get from Florence to Cinque Terre. which was a little rough because our trek came the day after my little bout with food poisoning our last night in Florence! When we finally arrived at our hotel, we discovered that they had "lost" our reservation! At this point, all we could do was laugh. Luckily, they put us up in an apartment across town which was owned by this adorable couple who ran a wine bar downstairs..and it ended up cheaper than the hotel we were going to stay in. In the end it worked out fine.
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| Our apartment |
Once we were situated there, we were starrrving. So we went and got ourselves some amaaazing pesto, which Cinque Terre is known for:
Our second day we decided to do the major hike between the 5 towns. We set out at 9am and I was
determined to do the full 5 hour hike between all five towns.
Let me tell you this was a HIKE. Tons of stairs, lots of narrow steep walkways with no guardrails. This was a workout and a half.
But then you'd get these beautiful views like this and it was all worth it!
After an hour and a half on the first part of the trail, we started to see the second town below!
We stopped in town for a panini and powerade.
After some time in the first town, we started on the next part of the trail to Corniglia
Stopping to take in the view:
We started onto the third part of the trail between the 3rd and 4th town. After walking for a bit, we hit a dead end! That part of the trail was closed! I guess there was some rain damage, or landscaping issues that made the trail unsafe to hikers! I was so upset....we literally only had 1 hour and 20 minutes left of our hike and now we couldn't do it! We went all the way back to the previous town to try and get a train or boat back to our island. Well....of course, that town was the ONLY one that didn't have a boat service to and from it, and Cinque Terre was experiencing a train strike between 9-5 that day. We were pretty much stuck. I guess in the end, a few trains were sporadically running...so we caught one to the next town over and took a boat from there. which was very nice and worth the trip.
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| In one of the towns |
So even though we didn't get to do the last two parts of the trail, we still hiked for 3 1/2 of the 5 hours!!I'm proud of that and won't let it get me down too much that we didn't do the full thing.
That really was the bulk of our short time in Cinque Terre. That night we had a wonderful dinner and watched a live band perform Italian music while many of the locals danced by the water. It was our most relaxing night yet, which was good because we had a FIVE HOUR commute to Venice the next day....
