It’s been a while, and I am way behind on posts. I am back in Sacramento now, waiting for Ziqin to be able to move over here. I now work as a back-end web developer for a company here and I am working very long hours (often leaving work after midnight) so I haven’t had much chance to catch up on posts. And now I’m going to just do them out of order 
So to start I’m going to write about our time in Cinque Terre (Five Fishing villages) on Italy’s western coast.
It is a bit north of Pisa, though we never got the opportunity to go there and see the Leaning Tower.
You know I should back up just a bit. So our original plan for our trip in Italy was to fly into Rome (which we did) and then only stay there a couple days and rent a car from there to tour around the rest of the country and even up to Switzerland. We were even going to make a pit stop in Liechtensten just so we could say we had been there. Our plans changed when we went to pick up our rental car and they asked for my international driver’s license and I didn’t have one.
An international license is pretty cheap to get, only about $35 if you walk into any AAA store in the US and ask to get one (assuming you already have a US driver’s license). However I had been living in Beijing and didn’t get the opportunity. I had also forgotten that my European driver’s license I had when I was living in Kosovo had expired (that was how I had been allowed to rent one the first time we went to Italy in September 2013).
So our plans changed and we had to use trains for the rest of our trip in that part of the world. This changed some of our Switzerland travel plans, but our Italy travel plans mostly stayed the same. We were able to get trains going everywhere we had planned in Italy on the days we had planned.
So we took the trane from Venice to La Spezia which is right by Cinque Terre. There we were able to transfer over to a local train and go into Cinque Terre. Cinque Terre consists of five villages: Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore. Our hotel was in Riomaggiore, the most southern of the five villages. We stayed at the Affittacamere Dune Blu hotel, which was excellent! The hotel was right on the coast, it was only about $90 a night (not bad for that area) and it was plenty clean and accomodating.
Now we did have to climb lots of stairs to get there, and throughout our time in Cinque Terre. There are tons of stairs there! So our train came in to Riomaggiore and we got out and walked through a tunnel to get to the main part of town. From there we called the hotel and the lady who ran it met us down on the street and led us to the hotel. We dragged our luggage up about 50 steep stairs to get to the front door, and then up another 20 or so to get to our room. That night we went for a walk to explore the town, and discovered how beautiful it was! The views were amazing! We wandered around, going up hundreds of stairs to get to some of the trails up in the hills, we watched the sunset, ate gelato and pizza, and Ziqin ate some seafood sold from a street vendor.
After sunset we went back to the hotel and turned in for the night so we could get up early the next day to really enjoy our time there! The second day was our only full day there, on the third day we caught our train to Zurich (we really wish we had spent another night in Cinque Terre instead, but we’ll get to that later).
So on day two we got up early and caught the train to the furthest north of the villages, Monterosso if I remember correctly. Anyhow, we checked out the town a bit and then started heading towards the next village, using the hiking trail and going up hundreds of stairs, probably over a thousand (though neither of us counted) during the hike. We took in the spectacular views throughout the trip and then we got to the next village where we ate some lunch and then rented a kayak. We kayaked back to the village we had hiked from, stopping to swim some along the way, and then kayaked back to where we had rented the kayak from. It was a few miles round trip, and we certainly were worn out by the time we turned in the kayak!
I believe we paid about 20 Euros for the kayak to use it for two hours (it was a two man kayak). As I said, after a full day of hiking and kayaking we were exhausted, but we still managed to go out and eat some more Gelato, pasta, pizza, and seafood (well Ziqin ate the seafood, not me).
Cinque Terre was beautiful, and had a lot of outdoor activities to offer. Located on the Ligurian Sea, the water is calm and comfortable to swim in and kayak on. It is salty enough to make it easy to float. It was a very relaxing place, unlike many of the other cities and places we went to, there weren’t a lot of sites to see, it was just beautiful scenery and a relaxing environment.
Again, I highly recommend the hotel we stayed at, it was definitely one of the best ones we stayed out during out month of traveling in Europe! We plan to go back there again some day and enjoy the outdoors and relax on the coast!
