Cinque Terre

Last Friday, I hike Cinque Terre with my friend Kimmy.  Cinque Terre literally means "5 Lands" since you hike through 5 beautiful coastal towns.  I am going to do this blog a little differently.  I am going to have a picture, then explain it.  We'll see how it goes!

1st Town- Riomaggiore.  We arrived from Florence at 10:15 am

 From there we walked the "Walk of Love"

The views were absolutely amazing and the water was an incredible shade of blue.  I didn't edit these pictures either. 

Kimmie and I

We reached the second town of Vernazza

The path along the coast to the next town was closed because there was a legit landslide so we did the mountain hike instead. It consisted of walking up a ton of steps!

Vernazza (the 2nd town) from the mountain top

So happy to be hiking!

You can see the little path and how high up we hiked.  When we came down, we realized we were in the clouds!

The third town, Cornigilia 

Hiking away

Corniglia was such an Italian looking town

This is in Corniglia.  It reminded me of the hike we would do when we lived in Camarillo since there was a "teacup" of water framed by the mountain side/city. 

Corniglia again.  You can see the terraced vineyards. We walked through many vineyards during our hike.  My mom also told me that the are more stones used here to terrace the mountain side then there are in the Great Wall.  I know it's hard to believe, but every single mountain is terraced.  It's crazy!

There were so many cats along the paths. I made friends with this little guy.  He immediately ran up to me and started purring and rubbing my legs. 

This is one of the closed paths we took.  This is from Corniglia to Vernazza.  It's closed because there could be landslides and since it's not summer time yet they don't want to open it.  We passed a ton of people and did not see anything wrong with the trail.

Hiking along!  

The water was just amazing and there were these neat little caves and rock formations along the coast. 

We made it to Vernazza, which was the cutest and prettiest of all the towns.  It is literally right over the water. 

There were boats in the streets and so many bright, happy colors.

We stopped here to have our picnic lunch right on the water.  

Then we took another closed trail to the last town.  They were doing construction and decided to place these huge bags of boulders or sand right in the middle of the path, forcing us to climb over them.  This path was probably closed for a reason. Oh well! There was a couple in front of us and we met other girls who said they had hiked it so we assumed it was fine and it was- we lived!

The last town, Monterosso.

We made it!

We arrived in Monterosso around 5:30 at night. 

The beach! It felt so good to take off my shoes and have my feet in the sand and cold water. 

Kimmie and I were both exhausted on the way home.  We arrived back in Florence around 10 at night.  What a beautiful hike and a great day.

Skiing the Italian Apennines

Step 3 of an Amazing Weekend: Ski the Italian Apennines

It was beautiful, and cold, and snowy, and white, and amazing, and fun, and hard!

I hadn't been skiing since I was 8 years old (11 years ago!) so it was a bit more difficult then I thought it would be.  Still, it was a blast and I did quite a bit better then I thought I would have.  I think that if I had spent a couple of days there, I would have been close to a pro.  That may be a little exaggeration, but whatever.
We took the last bus of the season that went form Florence to Abetone.  It was still so snowy and beautiful! They had 2 inches of snow the night before we went so it was all fresh.  I absolutely loved skiing and being in the snow.  I did follow a group of little ski kids down the bunny slopes at first so I could figure it out but once I remembered, it was great!
We had a picnic lunch and then went back to skiing.  Italy doesn't label their trails like they do in the US so there was no way of knowing whether a train was green or black.  So I tried to go down this one trail that was very difficult for me.  It took me an hour and a half to get down doing a combination of skiing, scooting on my butt, and then walking down with my ski's in my hand.  The last bit was so steep and curvy that I thought I would fall off the side of the mountain if I tried to ski down.  It was so much fun.  I love skiing and I want to go next winter!

Abetone

Bunny slope-trying to remember how to ski

Ski lift up!

Going up the mountain

Ta-Da!

So pretty

Me and Kimmy

Me at the top!

Kimmy 

Ski lift

So pretty

Katie, Me, Caitlin, Kimmy

Full moon over the Ponte Vecchio welcomed us home

Hike through Tuscany

Step Two of an Amazing Weekend: Hike through Tuscany

I went on a hike through Tuscany with my friends, my Italian and Humanities teacher, and one of the ladies who works for our program and her two adorable kids.  The hike was awesome.  I love hiking and living in Florida, it's not something I am able to do very often.
We had pretty good weather and luckily the rain held off.  We had a picnic lunch, saw butter houses (a house where they would store butter because it stays cold) and then went to a monastery where we crashed a wedding- unintentionally of course!  Our teacher wanted to show it to us but there was a wedding going on so we waited outside but then the party moved outside- awkward.  We were all in our bright rain coats and the Italians were all in dark grays and blacks.  Oh well, it's a funny memory to have.

Pretty Waterfall 

Tuscany 

Path

Butter House

Picnic

Group Photo

Gaby, Bufano (my teacher) and me

The wedding

Dark clothes

And us

The hike was beautiful and the views were great.  It was such a fun day.