We left the chaios that was Thessaloniki behind and flew to Milan, Italy arriving in the pooring rain. Since it was pooring and Easter so everthing was closed anyway, we didn't even try to see anything. The next morning we went to the train station to try and buy Eurail passes. At the train station, which was the size of DIA, no one had heard of Eurail even though their website specifically said that we could get them there. We cut our losses and just bought a ticket to La Spezia where the Cinque Terre is. It turns out after all of our Itailan rail tickets we spent half of what a eurail pass cost anyway!
In the cinque terre we stayed in one of the five towns, Riomaggiore. We spent most of our time just exploring the towns and relaxing. We spent one day walking the Camino del Rey which is a path that connects all of the towns. We took our time and stopped at beaches and the towns along the way. We saw one beach way below, it looked so beautiful that we headed down even though it looked really far. After 45 min we made it and took out our lunch for a picnic. Maybe 5 minutes into our picnic a large German man walked 15ft past us, laid out his towl and stripped butt naked and laid out. He was far from discrete. We decided to finish our lunch quickily and walk the beach to get away from this guy. We walked a few hundred feet and came around a corner only to find about 20 nude sunbathers! All men, all old and all overweight! Not really worth the hike. Going back up we decided to take what looked like a shortcut. After just a little while though, the trail ended and we ended up doing some 5th class climbing up walls and it took an hour and a half. Plus, we were only half of the way done with the Camino! The rest of the walk was unreal how beautiful it was, though!
While we were there, we heard that there was climbing a few towns away. Having no idea where, we took the train to that town and started asking around. Amazingly, people actually knew where the climbing was and within a few hours we were climbing. It was really nice being on some well protected routes, not risking life and limb like Meteora! We eneded up going back the next day too!
Also the pesto was amazing (that is the region where it originated) and we ate it like 5 nights in a row. Lisa even found pasta she could eat with it.
After the Cinque Terre we took a train to Florence. Along the way the train stopped in Pisa so we decided to get off and hike all the way across the city with our packs! Lisa made me jump through hoops with my 50lb pack to get the stupid picture above!
In Florence we stayed at a hostel with pretty much all 19 year olds trying to get drunk and hook up. It was ok though. While in Florence we moslty just wandered around trying to get lost. We went the the Uffizi Gallery and saw thousands of pictures of Jesus. It was cool though seeing paintings by all four ninja turtles! We also went into the Duomo, which is without a doubt the most beautiful building I have ever seen. (On the outside, the inside was so so, a few too many crucifixes for my taste.)
We wanted to see the Bobli Gardens, but being on a budget we decided not to pay but to try to catch a view from somwhere on the perimeter. No go; they had that thing completly walled in! We did however, in the process, get nice and lost on some neat little streets between mansions and ended up high on a hill overlooking the city with some amazing view and no tourists.
We also spent a lot of time trying gelato, and had the most delicious pear gelato that even had the same texture as pears. While we were there we took a day trip to Sienna which was the perfect example of a beautiful Tuscan hill town. There we did pretty much the same thing, just wandering around trying to get lost and away from tourits and tourist prices.
After Tuscany it was off to Rome (Blog to come).
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