Dana Sue: Cinque Terre

Selina and I went to Cinque Terre the first weekend of October. Cinque Terre is a couple hours north of Italy in the Italian Riviera…so in other words, SO BEAUTIFUL. Cinque Terre, literally meaning “five lands” is a series of five towns on the sea that are connected by a 7 mile hiking trail. Most people go to Cinque Terre for a day - do the hike - and go home. But, we wanted to have more of a relaxing weekend so we stayed the night and spent two full days there.

We actually couldn’t find a vacant hostel online before we went, so we just showed up to the first city in hopes that we could find one. Fortunately we did find one…even though it was a bit sketchy. We found a lady in the middle of the street offering hostel rooms for the night (seems strange, but our Rick Steves’ book said there would be a woman in the street offering rooms). This woman didn’t ask for our passports or even for our names, we just handed her cash and she gave us a key. Super sketchy.

We did the 7 mile hike our first day in Cinque Terre. The hike connects each of the five cities and is along the Ligurian Sea, which feeds into the Mediterranean Sea. We started out on the easy part of the trail and it gradually got more and more difficult as you go from city to city. The difficult parts were actually pretty rough, but then again, maybe I’m just not a hiker! 5 hours of hiking wouldn’t be top on my list of fun things to do in my free time, but the views that we saw were absolutely amazing! It was definitely worth it. We actually had to cut our hike short because it started to get dark, and we didn’t want to get caught in the middle of the trail after dark. We stopped in Vernazza, the 4th town, for a relaxing beer by the sea, dinner, and gelato.

The next day we took a boat from the first city to the fifth, since the last city had sandy (rather than rocky) beaches to swim at. Being on a boat in the Mediterranean was pretty awesome and then we laid out on the huge rocks and swam the rest of the afternoon. The weather was absolutely perfect…the sun was shining and it was so warm! Selina and I both (being the most fair-skinned people in the world) ended up getting sun burnt!

Unfortunately, we usually have at least one mishap on every trip, and this one was no different. We accidently got on the wrong boat to go back to the train station and ended up in a town that wasn’t even in Cinque Terre. We had no way to get back to Cinque Terre to catch our train; so needless to say, we missed our train and had to find a different way to get back home. We had to take a bus to a station in a different city, but thankfully we were able to find a train back to Florence.