So I am sitting in an internet cafe in Venezia (so excuse the typos-Im usins an ITalian keyboard), and I am going to type about our last weekend in Cinque Terre as I realized I have yet to do so. Maybe tonight I will get to some more of Venize.
There were 6 of us who went on this particular excursion, Anrew, Aaron, Pat, Oliva, Lee Catherine, and myself. We got to have lunch at the Villa (yay, free food!) before leaving, so that was awesome. We then made our way tot he train station and off to La Spezia we went. Now La Spezia is not part of Cinque Terre, but it is quite a nice city just South, and you can easily take the train up. In fact, if you buy a 10 euro pass, you have all access to the trains and trails, so that is what we did.
I am getting ahead of myself though. The train ride in was fairly uneventful, minus the chattering Italian women for most of the 3 hours. We got off the train, and literally right across the street was our hotel. It wasn't anything fancy, but it worked for one night. We dropped our stuff off and left to explore the city.
La Spezia, or shopping mecca as we now call it, is a quaint, very Italian city. I did not see many tourists, though the shopping is unbelievable and the city is quite picturesque. We wandered all the way down the main street, walked along the marina/waterfront/harbor/whatever the heck it was, and took silly pictures in the beautiful gardens. We then made our way back into the city, wandered around, Olivia and LC did some of the aforementioned shopping, and then we found a place for dinner. I decided to be brave and try something new, pasta with shrimp instead of just my usual pasta. Sadly, this was not plain pasta with shrimp as I had imagined. Instead, it was pasta with sauce and HUGE shrimp, or what I call prawns. I tried it anyway, and sadly, it was not to my liking. Luckily, the waitress took it awaya nd gave me my usual, and did not charge us for that first pasta dish. After dinner we were all tired, so we were in bed by 11 to get up at 7 the next morning.
The following day was hike day, yay! We had a nice breakfast, love the international hotels, and made our way to the train station. It was a little cold, and rained off and on, but we were not too worried. Finding the trainw as fun, as we looked at the arrivals board instead of departures board first. Oops, my bad. We found the right track though, and even though everybody doubted I had us on the right train, we got exactly where we needed to be :-)
Our first stop was Monterosso al Mare. This is the northernmost city in the park known as Cinque Terre. We first wandered a bit more northward to see the Giant. I am not sure what the history of the Giant is, but he is really cool, so we took lots of pictures before heading to the trails.
At this point it began to rain. It wasn't too bad, and was in fact quite welcome as we thought it might keep us from sweating. So we began our hike, and I have to say, I knew I was out of shape, but those stairs killed me. I was fine on every part of the hike except those dang stairs. Its funny though, because three years ago I was leading the group up those stairs. This time I was the caboose. I have resolved to start running more so that doesn't happen again, lol. In any case, the 20 pound backback with all of our stuff (camera, water, jackets, money, phones, etc) didnt help, nor did tha rain. This trail was probably the most difficult of the 4 trails. There are parts where it is literally a foot wide, and other parts where there are literally 100 stairs. It goes up into the hills, on top of the Mediterranean, and through vinyeards. It is stunning, but tiring. There were parts of this particular hike where you could not see 2 feet in front of you due to the rain. We were so wet that all of our clothes looked a shade darker than they had in the morning. It was kind of nice because it kept us cool, but man, that made it tough.
In any case, we made it Vernazza, the next city, in less time than the route said it would, despite the rain, so that was cool.
I will have to update more later as I am out of time, so arreviderci, and I will be blogging again tonight from the Villa :-)
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