Best vacation/ workout of my life.

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I can't even begin to describe how amazing Cinque Terre was. I will start from the beginning of the day.....

We (as in my four roommates and two other girls from American) took the 7am train on Saturday, it was probably a four and a half hour trip from Rome to Cinque Terre. We talked to these really nice Italian men during the ride. They told us lots of different places to visit in Italy and gave us some traveling advice. When we finally got into Riomaggiore, it was around 12:30. We walked around for a minute trying to find our hostel and had a quick lunch. Our hostel was this little apartment on top of this huge hill. Well, I wouldn't say hill because I didn't actually see a hill, but we had to walk up three thousand stairs to get to the front door so I am assuming it was on a hill. We shared the hostel with three kids from Pepperdine. They were really nice. We dropped our bags and then we were off.......

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The Hike

Cinque Terre consists of five little towns, Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza, and Monterosso al Mare, on the coast of the Mediterranean. Each town is perched up on the giant cliffs facing the sea. There is a train that connects the five towns, but most people hike to each town through the mountains. We stared off in Riomaggiore. Along the way, there were a lot of swimming areas where people were jumping off rocks and snorkeling. The water was beautiful, it looked like listerine. We really wanted to see all the towns, so we didn't stop to swim. We could have used a swim though, the hiking was rough. At first there was an actual path, but between Corniglia and Vernazza things got really rustic. The "path" between the third and fourth town was hundreds of uneven rock "stairs" and very rocky, very narrow paths. We would walk downhill for a little bit and then walk up, up, up, up, up. It was really hard work, but it payed off. There were so many spots where you would climb forever and then you would be looking out over the coastline from hundreds of feet up on the mountain. Beautiful.

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When we got to Vernazza, my roommate Megan and I stopped. We walked around the town and watched the sunset over the water. Then we found a little restaurant and had dinner outside. Cinque Terre is famous for its' seafood (obviously) and pesto. We shared a huge plate of pesto pasta, which was the best pasta I have had since being in Italy, and Insalata di mare. Insalate di mare is a plate full of seafood. Lots of seafood. There was calamari, shrimp, this little lobster like thing with its' eyes still on, some octopus, mussels, and some mystery fish. Both of us ate a little bit of everything, even the mystery fish. It was actually really good. After dinner, we walked around the tow some more and had gelato (my favorite). Then, we went home and talked with the other kids in our hostel, and went to bed.

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Day Two

Sunday was great! It was more relaxing than Saturday because we weren't climbing a mountain. We took the train from Riomaggiore to Monterosso so we could go to the beach. Megan and I rented a kayak for an hour.  We wanted to get into the water, but we didn't just want to jump in and then not be able to get back into the boat. We paddled over to some rocks and got out. There was nasty algae and stuff all over the rocks so they were really slippery, and there were mussels, hermit crabs, and sea urchins everywhere. Once we saw all of that, we got back in the boat. After our adventure at sea, we swam for a little while. The beaches were really pretty, but not very nice to swim at. There wasn't sand, it was just rocks. The rocks were really hard to stand on when you got into the water and they hurt to walk on. After we had enough with that, we got some lunch (more pesto) and headed back to the train station.

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The train ride back felt really long. We left at 6:30 and got into Rome around 11. It was a great weekend, but it is nice to be back in Rome again.