Tuesday, November 9, 2010

The Old Man and the Sea - Cinque Terre


The Old Man and the Sea
Originally uploaded by klheckert
From Rome, we headed to the coast to see Cinque Terre ("five towns"). These small villages are connected by a series of hikes along the ocean and mountains. While I could write all about our hike, its better for you to just go look at the photos (a picture is worth 1,000 words after all). Especially since all we did was hike and eat seafood pasta (NOM NOM NOM....) Just a few comments to go along with the photos:

- My definition of "hike along a path" is more or less stroll along a nice sidewalky type of path, up and down hills, but expecting guardrails where it gets close to cliff edges. The first hike we went on was listed as one of the hardest, but it was where we were starting from, so we figured no big deal. It turns out that their definition of hike is more like "be a mountain goat for an hour and a half." There were many, many parts where a misplaced step was all that was between you and a 150 meter (300 feet?) plunge off the side of a cliff onto the rocks below. Scary. But beautiful (and hard to capture on camera...)

-Some people, when seeing a waterspout on the way to an ocean get-away might think, "gee, the water might be a bit chopped up." My brain did not process this. But yes, as you can see in the photos, it was incredible. We thought it was choppy the first day. The second day, we saw waves that were consistently 8-10 feet high, winds that were sustained 48 km/hr (I looked it up), and the waves when breaking spraying up to 100 feet in the air. All of this was really hard to capture in pictures, but compare the first day to the second day in our little harbour. Even the locals were impressed by the storm surge, which apparently happens 2-3 times every winter.

-We are now in Interlaken, Switzerland. We arrived at night (it took us 10 hours including a 4 hour train lay-over in Milan), so have not yet seen the Alps which are towering over us. Should have some good photos soon!!!

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