Cinque Terre was Nice

Well we arrived in a little town just outside of Cinque Terre at about 2:15 and had to wait there for a 20 min bus ride to the little village we were staying in. We got to our hostel at 4:45. Yep that's right, this means we waited for a bus for about 2 hours. To make matters worse, when we got to our hostel we found out that we were a good 2 hour walk from the first of the 5 cities and the last bus left for our hostel at 6:30. We said oh well and started walking to the Cities. We made it to the first one, Riomaggiore, at about 7 then sat at a nice little place and had a great seafood pasta dinner, it was awesome. After dinner we decided it was prob. a good idea to start walking back to our hostel seeing it was going to take us about 2 hours to get there. On the way back, we decided we were going to try and stop everyone as they were going by to see if they would pick us up. We were finally successful about 50 min into our walk. This nice couple from Hong Kong asked if we needed a ride. The man was a native Italian and his wife was from Singapore, so they spoke great English. They were so surprised we had walked the whole way and wouldn't let us pay them or anything. This was a highlight of the trip, hitch hiking in Italy!

The next day we decide we were going to wake up and take the first bus away from out hostel at 7am. When we got up we were greeted by rain...exactly what we didn't want to happen in our first beach city :(. We went back to bed for a little and got on the 9:50 bus and by that time the rain had pretty much stopped, just a little sprinkling here and there. Once in Rio, we took the train down to the other end to take the 12K hike from Monterosso back to Riomaggiore. We were informed this was would be much easier and much more beautiful. Although the overcast rainy day made the walk much cooler, it also made the mud trails very slippery, not good when you are climbing up and down mountains. Despite the minor setbacks, this was one of the prettiest walks I have ever made. It was so cool to round the corner and see this quaint little city on the hillside. Along the way, we would make a short stop in a few of the cities for a little bite to eat and just to take it all in. When we got back to Riomaggiore, we went to a few places looking to see if anyone had openings for next night. We found a great place for only 6 euro more than we were paying for our current place. We wanted to be able to stay actually in one of the towns so we could enjoy the night and a sunset there instead of eating at the one pizza place in the town we were currently in. The only problem was they didn't take reservations for single day guest, so we would have to show up the next morning and hope it was still available.

Luckily, it was, so we cancelled our current reservations and stayed at the night in Rio. During the day, we got on the train and made our way down to Monterosso slowly by stopping in a few of the towns along the way. It was cool to see how they were all very similar, but each still had its own vibe.

The next day, we woke up and got an early train out to Nice. Surprisingly it took us about 6 hours to get there. When we arrived in Nice, we found our hostel and some exciting news to go along with it. When checking in, the owner asked us if we would like to know the good or bad News first. We chose bad. He informed us that our room was on the second floor and one of his third floor showers had overflowed and messed up 5 of his rooms, ours being one of them. He said I do not have a place for you to stay here, but I have already called a hotel and had you a three person private room reservation at no extra cost. I will give you your deposit back and you will owe them exactly what you would have payed me. We were very impressed by his professionalism because along the way we ran into people who showed up at their hostel and the people told them they didn't have a room anymore and gave them no advice on where to go. For the remaining part of that day, we went down to the beach and then out for an amazing meal on the pedestrian promenade.

We decided to start the next day in style by going to another country, Monaco. Our first impression was a really nice train station, something we had yet to see on our trip. When we walked out of the station, we were immediately at the Marina with a collection of some of the biggest boats I had ever seen. Several of them had to have been close to 50ft wide and close to 125 ft. long. It was crazy! After looking at the boats for a little bit, we went on up to the Monte Carlo to take a picture. Drew was the first, so he walked up the steps. Little did we know, that was a no no. This guy came out told him to get off. They were mainly upset about the footprints drew left... After walking around for about an hour and a half, we headed back to Nice for lunch and relaxing on the beach. We did this for the rest of the day then went back to the same place for dinner. After dinner we called it a night because of our 14 hr train ride to Barcelona the next day starting at 6am.

Vamonos a la Barcelona!

Michael