05 • 03 • 16

EUROPE | CINQUE TERRE/LEVANTO

Life sure has taken off since I returned home from Europe. I have not really had down time, but who can complain when they spent the month of April traveling? I need to finish blogging the trip before I forget everything…

Cinque Terre, which is 5 cities along the coast, was a priority on our trip to Italy. We decided to spend 3 night & 4 days there & I am so happy we did that. Cinque Terre has become quite popular among tourists, so after much research, we decided to stay in the city just north of the first city that’s part of “cinque terre”!! We loved Levanto, too! It is actually known for Surfing. We met a couple surfers from Germany & Switzerland. They literally drove from their country for the weekend to surf.

Upon arriving, we walked around Levanto & decided to leave the day trip for Cinque Terre. The first full day we hiked. It was probably the most intense hike I have ever been on. Of course I had to take my camera, so that was just added weight. It was a pretty cloudy day, which turned to rain. I was not too happy about the rain, as you can imagine, but I lived. We had about 18 miles in that day. Most people do the hike through Cinque Terre, but we went above that because we hiked from our city to the first city of Cinque Terre. We met several Americans on the hike, which was fun to engage in conversation with them.

Day 2: Instead of hiking along the coast, we decided this day would be spent exploring the actual cities themselves. Instead of taking the train back, we took a ferry ride, which was epic. I loved viewing the cities from the water. We may have decided on the ferry partly because we got a ticket on the train earlier that day. We understood our ticket for Cinque Terre was good for 6 hours, but when they checked our ticket, it had expired after 75 minutes. So that part was quite unfortunate, but I’m thankful he only charged us for one person and not two.

Day 3: We spent our last morning in Levanto & rented bikes. They have a bike path that we road along the water & it was perfect. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves…

WHERE WE STAYED

PINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGEPINIMAGE