A Perfect Weekend

CRM - The weekend before last, my friends and I took a trip to Cinque Terre. It is the place I ‘ve been looking forward to seeing the most and let me tell you, I was NOT disappointed. Cinque Terre is absolutely, stunningly beautiful!

Before we made it to the coast, we woke up early on Friday and took a train to Pisa. The only real reason why we wanted to go there was to take a picture with the leaning tower. I was surprised to see that the rest of the city seemed to be pretty dead. They had a ton of shops and tourist-y things to do but not enough people there to do them. It was so strange! Either way, I enjoyed getting to take a picture with the tower. I mostly just laughed at how funny other people looked while trying to pose with the tower. It was pretty hilarious to see all the poses. 

After Pisa, we had another two-hour train ride to our stop in Cinque Terre. Once we started to see the ocean from the windows of the train, everyone started getting especially restless. We were ready to be swimming and laying out in the sunshine! The water was the bluest water I’ve seen in Italy yet. It was gorgeous. All the colors were bright actually, from the water to the smallest flower on the sidewalk. I felt like I was inside a rainbow.

We got to our hotel – it was actually more like one huge beach apartment – and immediately put our bathing suits on and headed to the beach. We spent the rest of our day lying by the ocean and catching the last bit of rays before the sun went down.

The next day was our first full day in Cinque Terre. My friends and I woke up early again and went on a hike through the towns. The hike was one of my favorite things that we’ve done so far on this trip. It was really hard at times because we’d walk uphill for what seemed like forever but even so, the hike was completely worth it. The views were amazing. I had no idea we had walked so far up until I got the chance to look down. The boats and houses along the ocean kept getting smaller and smaller. We could see everything! 

During our hike, we saw lots of plants. I remember seeing a ton of lemon trees terraced into the side of the mountain. Cherry trees were popular as well. I was so amazed at how the farmers would be farming literally on the side of a mountain! There were flowers everywhere, all different kinds, but some that I recognized as characteristic of Italy, like poppies, for example. I wished that Dr. Leo or my friend Keith were with us so that they could explain more about the plants we passed, like they did in the Roman botanical gardens.

Once we hiked to Monterosso, we ended up buying a beach chair and a strawberry daiquiri and laying out for about three or four hours. It was a perfect day, and a perfect weekend!