|  | | Day 25 | | | | | Today is the day we hike.
We are taking the 9km hike up and down the hills and mountains of the coastline of Cinque Terre. Oh you bet we are.
We put on tons of sunscreen and head off to the start at 11:30am.
Hiking to Manarola is easy obviously it's the paved walk that takes 20 minutes. We walk through Manarola and take some lovely pictures of the pastel buildings and the city's marina and beach area.
On to Corniglia. This walk is a little more "strenuous" and by that I mean the path is not paved and we head uphill a little more. The landscape is still breathtaking and the walk takes us about 45 min to get to Corniglia. Or so we thought. Okay so the 382 steps zig zagging up the hill gets us to Corniglia. Great. sounds fantastic. If I lived here I would never go to the train station because then I'd have to take the stairs. We make it to the top and head towards the next town.
The trip to Vernazza gets increasingly harder but is mostly a variation of steps and steep slopes combined with some downward steps and level ground. It is a nice mixture and takes about 75 minutes to walk into Vernazza. The city is bustling with shops and we get a little turned around taking pictures of the marina but eventually get going in the right direction towards Monterosso al Mare. Oh WOW. Okay that was definitely regarded as the most difficult hike I've ever walked. The fact that we had to stop 3 times on the uphill portion was saying something since we only stopped previously when we actually made it to a city. This walk turned into a narrow passageway around and up the mountains inside the trees and along rocky paths. It was a real trekking experience I'm pretty proud of us for pushing through because it took almost 2 hours to complete just the last city. We finished the 9km in 4 hours, and the fast trekkers take 5 hours generally so I think we're pretty much the best hikers in all of Cinque Terre.
Saw the beautiful ocean after hiking downwards for almost 30 minutes and it was just so inviting I wanted to jump in. Unfortunately we were about 150 feet above the jagged rocks leading to the water so that didn't really seem like an option at the time.
We stopped at the very first cafe/ristorante we saw and ordered some foccaccia prosciutto and mozzarella sandwiches and I had a tuna salad which was so delicious I will dream about it when I go home. We head back to the apartment for the night after the exhaustion wore off slightly after eating and resting for almost an hour by the beach.
I went home and slept. for hours. it was so nice.
I woke up and spent all my minutes talking to Eric about 200 minutes that I had left. Oops. Oh well I love my sweetie it was worth it.
Went back to bed and slept about a full 11 hours. Great day.
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