Cinque Terre

Ciao!! Today was our day trip to Cinque Terre. After some help planning what we were going to do at the 5 towns from Rick Steves. The weather started out cold, humid, and rainy. But that was better than the alternative of humid and 90 degrees, so I was ok with it. 

A lot of people on the tour had planned on laying on the beach all day, the flash floods, thunderstorms, bouts of lightning and down pour of rain spoiled any chance of a beach day. But I am glad to finally be able to say I have seen and touched the Mediterranean Sea. The first town we stopped at was Riomaggiore. It was more of a working town, then touristy. But we has to climb a huge hill from the train station, just to get to the shops. We all say we have Cougar calves, but now after today we have Cinque Terre calves. After climbing to the tops it wasn't anything special, but got some cool pictures of the streets below. 

Next town we visited was a two minute train ride to Manarola, which happens to be my favorite one so far. We had to climb (again) an even steeper hill to get these amazing shots .Luckily most of the tourists there were all old, so either they choose not to climb or they were super slow and it was easy to pass them, so I got some really great pictures without all the tourist in them.

This is the actual town and it's marina. Which there was a huge boat life to move all boats that lined the streets into the water. 

Views from the top of the hike. 

Now I know where they take the pictures for the Cinque Terre postcards that are in all the gift shops. While we sat up here to catch our breath and enjoy the views, I noticed a very old sign, all in Italian of course, so after getting out my translator, I discovered that the sign read cemetery with just an arrow. After I saw that was ready to go, I didn't know it's was about another 1/4 mile up hill, so I might have been hyperventilating by the time I got to the top but it was so worth it. 

After spending a little bit to much time at the top, we ended up missing our train, bu the view from our bench at the train station wasn't half bad so I look at it as more of a positive moment rather than negative one. 

We were running low on time, so we decided to skip towns three (Corniglia) and four (Vernazza) and go straight to five (Monterosso). This one was pretty cool it is know for its beaches but because of the weather they were shut down. 

We went on a little walk not really knowing where we were going, but wanted to get away from the big tour groups yelling different languages into megaphones. We ended up on this really cool lookout and got some cool pictures from there. 

On our walk we saw a sign for another cemetery except this one was created in the 14th century. And off I went with Taylor and Danielle straggling behind me. It was easily a mile trek up hill to get to this amazing site and luckily no one was there. 

And since it was the highest point on the mountain I got some pretty cool shots too. 

After that tiring experince we needed foods so we stopped at a sea side caffe, assuming they would have something other than Itailian food. Nope just Italian,which was very good as was the view.

After arriving back in Florence we heard there was a major storm, and I thought that can't be that big (Italians tend to exaggerate what is bad and good for weather) but nope after some serious damage all over the city from harsh wind and rain, we found this pile of very big hail under a shattered skylight in out apartment complex entry. But over all it was a very adventurous day.