This is the day...this is the day...oh boy was this A day!

Katy and I still aren't quite sure what the moral of the story is here...maybe it's "don't travel on Friday the 13th", maybe it's "be really careful how you plan out your trips"... we don't really know yet, and we may never know.  What we do know is that somehow, our two-day weekend trip to Cinque Terre turned into a comical and exhausting almost 12 hour day journey.  Let me start at the beginning, for those of you whose curiosity I've captured. 

The day began not all that early with a train scheduled out of Florence at 10:30 in the morning. So we woke up relatively early that day, packed our backpacks and headed out to the station by about 10AM.  We stopped at this little old man's shop that we have had to see and smell every morning on the way to school.  So, finally that morning,  I told Katy, I'm stopping.  I'm so glad we did, because I got one of the best, fresh, warm doughnuts I've had in a long time.  She got some other deep fried rice fritter thing, and we both decided we didn't even want to share our goodies with each other, as we were both such large fans of our own purchases.  Needless to say, it's probably not a good thing that I have to pass this stand every morning on the way to school and walk by 80 cents of deliciousness everyday.  But I suppose it will teach me restraint.  ( I WILL fit in my wedding dress when I come back, I WILL! )  Maybe I'll just have to find another route to school, we'll see...

Anyways, from there on, we hopped on our train and a little over an hour later ended up in sunny and beautiful Monterosso, the first town of our intended tour of Cinque Terre.  

SIDE NOTE: for those of you who might not know about Cinque Terre, it's basically 5 (Cinque) little towns (terre) along the coast of the Mediterrean Sea, which are all connected by hiking trails so that you can hike for a couple of hours and get  from one to the next, to the next, to the next, ...well, theoretically, you could do that.  In case you can't tell from my buildup of our story, that's not quite how it went for us... BUT back to Monterosso.  It was a beautiful, blue sky and sunny day when we left Florence and it only got more gorgeous as we headed towards our destination.  Here's a photo of Katy and I on the beach right outside the train station of Monterosso.   I had to set the camera up on a half brick wall to get this shot, so it's really far away.  I apologize for my poor photography skills, but I suppose I can't be a great blogger AND photographer, right? :) 

Anyways, this is where we were going to begin our journey, however, upon consulting the woman at the train station, we discovered that because it's still technically the winter season here in Italy and Cinque Terre is really a very touristy town, most places around the area were closed for the season.  And to top it off, all the hiking trails connecting the five towns were completely inaccessible at the time... great!  The lady kindly told us that the only way we would be able to get to the next town was by train.  So we bought a ticket and got on the next train to Vernazza, the nearest town, which happened to only be about 3 minutes away by train.  Go figure.  

Vernazza is where Katy had booked out hostel for the night, so we thought that now that we were in the right town, we should try and find it.  About an hour later, after walking all over the very tiny and very asleep town, we finally found ourselves following an Italian speaking man up yet another  set of stairs that we had perviously taken three times already, only to be led to the door of the woman that we had been looking for all along.  Let's keep in mind that by this time, it's still only about 2 or 3 in the afternoon.  The lady shows us our room, which was stuffed with four beds as it's supposed to hold four people, all four of which we had to pay for in the price of our room, even though there were only two of us. 

The lady gave us our key and left the room.   Katy sat on one of the beds and I sat on the one chair, and at that point we literally felt like we should just start to twiddle our thumbs, because there was nothing we could do. And we were going to be stuck here for the next, well, about 8 hours until we could even go to bed, just to wake up the next morning and not even be able to hike on to the next town on our journey, as all the trails were closed.  It was at that point, after about 20 minutes of siting in our room that we decided to take the orange peel from the orange that I had just peeled out of the trash can, grab out bags and go back to the lady and beg, or rather, argue for some, ANY, money back.  Katy did her best to reason with the lady, using her spanish, and all I caught was something about emergency and we have to go home ( this was my idea, by the way, to just tell her that something had come up back in Florence and we had to go back and could not stay so could we get any money back ) I don't know if the lady really didn't understand or if she just wanted to argue for the sake of arguing... we'll probably never know.  When it was all said and done, she finally decided to give us half of our money back, which was better than nothing.

So, after we had run down the stairs to get away from her, we headed back off to the train station to get some tickets to the last town we were intending on seeing this weekend.  We figured that at least we could take the train to it to see it, even if we couldn't hike to it, and then just catch the latest train out of that town back to Florence.  That's what we "figured"...

So, the next train was scheduled to leave the town at 5:30, it was at that time about 4.  Not a huge problem, we'd just go back down by the water, hang out and read until then.  Which we did, no problem.  The problem came when we went back up at 5:30 and confused our train with the other one on the wrong track, and consequently missed our train by about a minute.  We watched the correct train leave, just standing there on the track... not knowing what we were doing.  Frustrating, to say the least.  To keep everybody fully updated at this time, it was now late, dark, and cold, and we were hungry.  But, nothing, nothing, was open in the little tiny town we were stuck in.  Well, I suppose that's not all entirely true.  Turns out we just had to wait another hour for the next train so we ran back down to the town and found a little ceramics shop that randomly  happened to sell decks of cards too, so we bought some cards and played Go-Fish and Gin back up in the station until our NEXT train was supposed to leave.  

Here's a photo of us playing cards in the station... again, another timer photo.  Not the greatest, but we were just trying to capture our desperation of the situation. The lower photo is of Vernazza, where we were stuck for 4 hours.  Beautiful, I know, but not the greatest place to be stuck with nothing to do. 

Thankfully, we made the next train out of Vernazza onto Corniglia.  It took not even another five minutes to get there, but when we did we found out that the next and last train out of there going onto Florence was leaving in less than an hour and the actual town itself was a 15 minute walk, at least, from where we were currently at the station.  So, we settled with the fact that our hungry and rumbling tummies would not be getting any food until we got all the way back to Florence.  We passed the next hour in the small station of Corniglia singing songs, dancing about, and just acting goofy in general, mainly our of our hunger, exhaustion, and my desperate attempts to get warm.   I took a video on my camera of some of our antics in that hour, but I don't think I'll load that up, just to conserve some of the respect you might still have for us. 

 The warm train to Florence was a welcome thing and we were both so happy to finally be able to just sit down and know that for almost the first time that day, it seemed like, we were headed in the right direction. 

We finally made it back to Florence at about 10PM that night, very tired and very hungry.  We were determined to at least make it out to dinner though, so after dropping our bags back at our place we headed out to a little restaurant across the street and sat down to a warm and delicious dinner of gnocci, chicken, and stewed beef.  Warm food was a welcome feeling to our empty bellies.  I told Katy that were going all out that night, after a day like this, so we ended the evening with desserts, and chatted at our table until late in the night before returning to our room at almost 12:30. To sum it all up: what a day!  It was full of laughs and adventures.  A very memorable experience to say the least! 

Cheesecake and chocolate spice cake...always a good way to end the day!