Our first taste of Italy

After a fairly uneventful train ride to La Spezia, Italy, we were excited to get to our hotel and hopefully get some sleep. To our great excitement, we found that our room had A/C in it! This was a great thing as it was really quite humid and hot when we stepped out of the train.
We woke up and bought a 2 day pass to Cinque Terre National Park and hit the trails for the last two days! It's hard to put into words the sights we saw and the amazing natural beauty of the area. We really wish we could upload some pictures, but we can't find the motherboard of this computer to get a USB port. Needless to say, we took upwards of 500 pictures in the last two days. Unbelievable sights! Several of these pictures were pretty much the same angle as the ones from our Italy calendar at home, which we bought for inspiration through the last winter. The sea, in Char's words, "was the best color of blue, because it was blue, green and white, and clear. It was just incredible. I took a lot of pictures of that."
For those of you who want to know the details of where we are, look on Google Maps, and type in La Spezia. That's where our hotel is, and a little to the west and north is the 5 villages that make up Cinque Terre: Monterossa, Vernazza, Coringlia, Manarola and Riomaggiore. We took a train to Monterossa and then hiked to Vernazza along a coastal trail, which wound it's way partly up the mountainside, through vineyards and lemon groves. The path was quite steep, filled with endless steps (usually in the upward direction) and amazing vistas with great panoramic views of the sea and surrounding hillsides. We were reading that this area has been cultivated for the last 1000 years, and there are terraces all the way up the hillsides, so that the farmers can grow grapes and other plants. It took about 2 hours to get to Vernazza, and we were covered in sweat by the time we got there. A boiling hot day deserves gelato.
Let me tell you about the amazing gelato in Italy: its like having a piece of fresh fruit in icecream form. Words cannot express the awesomeness of raspberry gelato.Char rather enjoyed the dark chocolate variety. After refilling our water bottles and rehydrating ourselves, we continued onto the next village, Corniglia. So, doing a strenuous hike in the hottest part of the afternoon, we stopped frequently in the shady patches to leave sweat marks on the rocks where we sat. Again, winding through terraced vineyards and farms was in some places enchanting. We arrived in Corniglia, sweaty and hot. But with smiles on our faces from an amazing walk through some of the best scenery we have ever seen. Well worth the effort and time put into it.
Today, we went back and visited the other two villages, and the 20 minute walk between the two of them seemed like a leisurely stroll. Heck, it was a leisurely stroll. More gelato ensued along with focaccia pizza, which was rather tasty and we had another amazing day enjoying Cinque Terre. The villages themselves were full of steep streets, narrow staircases leading up the hillsides and little old ladies sitting on benches talking in Italian. Probably about all the tourists that come along the path. So I took a picture of them.
Plans for tomorrow? Not much. We might explore La Spezia a bit, but the main thing is rest, for the next day we're heading to Florence to start a week in Tuscany! We hope to do some day trips to Pisa, Assisi, Siena, see the country side and hopefully do a vineyard tour and enjoy life "Under the Tuscan Sun."

Ciao,
Brad and Char