Cinque Terre is the place I have been most excited to visit while here in Italy, but I guess not all travel plans can work out perfectly. We tried and were all prepared, but this trip just did not go smoothly to put it plainly.
We showed up at the train station at 7:20am for our 7:54am train (which we had confirmed was the correct train and time last night), only to find out that there was no train at that time. The information desk offered no reasoning for this, maybe it was the strikes or something, I don’t know. Anyways, I was pretty bummed to find out that the next train was at 9:54 am. I changed my attitude while chilling at McDonalds for 2 hours and revised my plans to hike the entire 5 town stretch, and settled for hiking to the third town then chilling on the beach. While at McDonald’s, Megan gave my first birthday present—Fireball! This is our favorite alcohol that we discovered in Whistler, Canada two winter breaks ago. We had thought they only sold it in Canada, but she found it and lugged through 6 countries to give it to me!
After we got on the train and made it to the first town in Cinque Terre, we walked the first section called the Lover’s path, which was a paved pathway that was beautiful, but kinda crowded. On this path I somehow got lost, but the girls finally found me after about a half hour (them having no phones sucks). When we got to the second town, we found out that the path from the 2nd to the 3rd was closed, so we waited for a train and hopped on to go to the next town. While at the next town, we looked at the train schedule that an information desk gave us and found out that the last train said it departed at 4:15 pm and it was already 2ish. Of course I was really bummed that after all this traveling and set backs, we barely had anytime there, when I had looked online and there were much later trains and the guy who sold us the tickets at the train station said there were much later trains as well. We got lunch and a bottle of wine, and our creepy really drunk waiter sang me happy birthday and kept giving me kisses on my cheek.
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| Mountain sides of Cinque Terre! |
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| Pathway of Lover's Walk |
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| These little figures are all over Cinque Terre-- so cute! |
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| There are locks like this all over-- you are suppose to bring and lock and lock it onto a chain in Cinque Terre for your lover |
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| View of the little town of Riomaggiore |
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| Love the train tracks right next to the ocean! |
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| Where we probably should have eaten lunch... |
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| All of us before our climb for 340+ steps... still smiling despite all the setbacks of the day! |
We got on the train to head back to the first town, only to find out that there were much later trains that left to go to Florence. By this time we were just over it and grumpy, so we got a train after waiting an hour, then had to wait another hour to catch the next train to Florence. Finally we arrived back in Florence at 9:30pm. Not how I imagined the day going, but now I guess I’ll just have to come back!
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