Cinque Terre day 2

A pretty good sleep last night. Not sure if I woke up for every train that passed by or not, but it was still a good sleep. Plus the heating here must be by water, it sounded like dripping water all night.  We are staying in a small place that I think has 3 rooms, up 77 stairs to get to the “hotel”. Plus that our room is over 2 floors, the bottom floor as a bathroom, couch, and small place to make coffee. Upstairs is the bedroom. Off our bedroom there is a small terrace, then if you walk up another bunch of stairs there is a gorgeous rooftop terrace. Price in the off season 65 Euro, can’t even imagine what you would pay in the summer time.

Up early and headed down the 77 stairs to get some crescents or something to start the day. Of course Andre first had to go to the waterfront to see if anything was going on. It is now about 7:45, a couple of fisherman out, and a few photographers. So of course Andre has to take a few pictures, then we are off. Grab a couple of crescents to go, we are off for a hike and on a limited time frame today.

Early morning in Vernazza

First hike is from Vernazza to Monterosso. This is a 2 hour hike that involved another very large number of steps. We are about 30 minutes in and 2 younger guys go running by, what a workout! We totally expected them to lap us and see them come back again.

For the first 1.5 hours these are the only 2 guys we see, we are out for an early start and we only run into people when we get near the end and they are leaving from Monterosso and going to Vernazza.

Steps, steps and more steps, this felt like my entire week-end, they were either up or down!

Gorgeous view of Vernassa on the walk to Monterosso

Example of signs marking the path, they also have red and white strips on rocks along the pathway.  It would be very hard to get lost on this path

It was another beautiful day, but the problem with starting so early in the morning is the light isn’t the best for views, it would have been a nicer afternoon hike. About halfway through the hike we came across a place where cat houses have been built. There is a note to please feed the cats if you pass by in the morning, and a box where the cat food is. So we put out cat food and left a couple of euros to buy more cat food. Turned the corner and there is a cat waiting for us. What a place for cats to be living, we are pretty far from anyone and pretty high up, but someone is looking after them.

Cat houses along the path

Maybe the cat heard andre opening the food, he was waiting around the corner!

We are starting to see some flowers blooming



looking back towards Vernazza, you can see the villages off in the distance

Little bridge we had to cross

Monterosso in the distance, it looks so close, but still so far...

We had climbed quite a bit at the beginning of our walk, but it seemed like there were so many more stairs to go down when we approached Monterosso.  Lots of people coming up at this point as it is a little later in the day and people are starting out from Monterosso. Lots of them taking breaks and huffing and puffing.  I was glad we were finished with our ascent, but I was slow going down.  We laughed that if Liam would have been with us we would have given him some Euros and told him we would meet him at the Gelato shop in about an hour, I'm sure he would have been twice as fast as us.  Me because I took one step at a time, Andre because he stops every 10 seconds for a picture!

A long way down to go!

This is only a portion of the steps, and these are real steps, they did not all look this good

Down, down, down, down....

We did see quite a few lemon tress and vineyards today, limoncello is made here in Monterosso

Getting closer to Monterosso!

Sign at the end, 2 hours to go back to Vernazza by foot, I'm not climbing all those stairs!

Monterosso seems to have one of the longest beaches of all, and lots of places to change into swimming suits. We did see one English family go in for a dip, crazy! Not sure where they are from, but I have my guess. We started out in jackets this morning, but these didn’t last long once we started hiking, but no way would I have gone swimming.



Sign said womens and mens washroom, I made Andre wait outside and stop any men coming in!

Tunnel from one side of town to the other

The only town with a real beach, and people were swimming!

Leaving the Cinque Terre region you can see the mountains in the background and quarry



As reminders we took pictures of the schedule for trains

We had intentions of after the morning hike going on a hike to a monastery that starts in Monterosso, but my knees were done after all those stairs coming down, and the light was not good for photography so we decided it was good to call it quits.

Andre grabbed another pastry and more water and we got the noon train out of Monterosso and moved on out of Cinque Terre to Viareggio. We were lucky and got on a train that we did not have to switch, so only 1 hour train ride!  This town has a carnival that they have 5 different days of parades. We had planned on going the first Sunday we arrive here, but our delay by a day in getting to Lucca meant that was out. Next we planned on going for Mardi Gras this week, but they are forecasting rain so decided to squeeze it in this week-end. The first carnival started in 1837 and it is now the largest folk event, 5 million Euro per year spent on it, with more than 600,000 attending each year now. It really was lots of fun, so many families out today, it was a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Lots of spectators gets dressed up, kids were having a ball. There is also a big thing here with confetti still, so weird. We say lots of it being thrown in the square in Siena earlier in the trip, and today there was tons of it. They sell it by the big bag, and the kids especially are throwing it at everyone.

The circuit for the floats is a 4 km circle, and you can walk between the floats as there are going by. Lots of political satire, and no one was more popular than Trump of course this year. I’m sure Andre will have lots of good pictures. We only posted a few pictures of the parade here. A separate blog will be done for it as there was already enough pictures for today.

check out Trumps hair, and that statue of liberty is a real man!

We left the parade a little early. We didn’t want to get caught in mobs of people for the train and we were exhausted. 2 hour hike, 1 hour train ride rest, then 4 hours on our feet at the parade, enough. Glad to be home,

We ended up on a train that got us home just before 6PM.  There was also a local carnival in Lucca this week-end that we had read about that ended at 6PM, so we walked right over to that Piazza to see if anything was still happening.  We were just in time to grab 2 glasses of wine and walk around a little.  You could see that lots of fun had been had, lots of confetti all over the ground!  Kids were still in line to get their faces painted, looked like fun, but on a much smaller scale!

Inside of Church in the Piazza where the carnival was

Walking home, so many people out tonight on a beautiful Sunday night

Andre made minestrone soup for supper, and I’m sure there will be no walk after supper tonight!

The evening was spent writting the blog and Andre working on the pictures of the first day.

Played 2 games of crib tonight.  Andre had no luck, got skunked on the first and lost the second as well.  We were both exhausted from the weekend, we headed to bed knowing we would sleep well tonight.