Honeymoon - Europe whirlwind tour

Today we hiked the 5 Cinque Terre towns with Emily and Charles. This was a difficult but breath taking hike! Think of the Oregon coast with the rolling hills and points along the coast line. Each gulley has another town nestled along the cliff and tiny amount of flat land along the beach. The views were wimply amazing! It was hard to take everything in.....the ocean.....the hills.....the towns! The hills are covered in greenery....extremely lush! Even the trails had creeks running down it in spots. The hike to the first two towns consisted of hiking literally straight up the hill via stairs built into the hillside....right alongside beautiful vinyards. In the first town (Vernazza) we stopped for bruchette. The 4 of us split 2 varieties...pesto and mozerella. The Pesto here is like candy! We never knew there were so many varieties of bruschette! In the second town we stopped for our first Italian pizza! WOW! The pesto pizza is to die for!!!! The last two towns were an easy stroll compared to the first two. This part is called lovers lane. Back in the day when these towns weren't connected, folks would only marry within their towns. Once the towns were connected, relationships branched out....thus the pathway was named lovers lane. In one spot there's hundreds of padlocks on the rail where people lock their lock and throw the key in the ocean as a symbol of their relationship.

We met up with Emily and Charles again for dinner and had a spectacular reavioli filled with spinach and ricotta in a walnut sauce that is to die for!!!!!

Tomorrow we head to Rome.

Blogs will be relatively short until we get to Rome on Wednesday. There is no Internet here in Monterosso for the laptop, so we are posting this from Wayne's phone.

Today we hiked across Venice with our gear to the train station, stopping at a couple last shops on our way out. One of the shops had spectacular italian sandwiches, which we grabbed a couple varieties for the train ride to Monterosso. The hike across the city took about 45 minutes. Being early in the day, the cool tmperatures helped out.

The train ride to Milan (had to change trains here) was nice. We still find it interesting the entire train system is run off of electricity here. No real locomotives. On our second train, we sat next to a couple whom were also on their honymoon. They are from hawaii (moving to the mainland currently). Charles and Emily have parallel lives to ours. Emily went to school at Oregon State! they got married in hawaii in February. So we chatted with them the rest of the trip and plan to meet up for a hike tomorrow.

One last comment for today, dinner was interesting. We found out this is the birthplace for pesto! So of course pesto was part of our dinner. One of the othe novelties at the restaurant we ate at is seafood stew (for a lack of a better name). They bring a gigantic ceramic bowl to your table and then pour a huge concoction of every seafood item caught in the area. We didn't get it, but from people around us, it looked like it had lobster, octorpus, clams, shrimp, and some other stuff. Quite overhwelming!

Ciao for now!

Ah...Venice! We had an even more perfect day today than yesterday. We woke to the sound of church bells but didn't get up early enough for services We started the day with a beautiful walk back to the train station and stopped for breakfast on the way...gelato of course We just couldn't resist. It was another day with nothing but blue skys. venice isn't too hot yet though. We walked and shopped and took lots of pictures and then stopped for another fantastic pasta meal. There was some kind of canoe race on the grand canal, so we watched the chaos that ensued as the taxis (boats) and the canoes tried to avoid each other. Then we walked some more. I think we basically walked the whole city. It's not big, but SO easy to get lost. That's part of the fun in it though. You're never really lost since the water keeps you from going to far.

After our walk, Wayne changed into pants (no shorts allowed in the churches) and we went to St. Mark's Basillica. It's free to enter and definitel worth the wait in line...which we did while eating more gelato. It's a spectacular gothic church but has renovations and additions from throughout the centuries and different ethnic groups. After another short walk, we decided we needed a nap and headed back to our very comfortable (but difficult to locate) hotel.

All refreshed, we got a little dressed up and Jenn put on her new italian leather shoes and we went to dinner near the Rialto. Another excellent pasta dinner and bottle of wine. Wayne finally found the ravioli he's been searching for. Seems that people here eat tortillini more often and apparently interchange the two words. After dinner, we walked and shopped some more, oh and ate gelato

The gondola ride was the highlight of our trip. Our gondolier spoke excellent English and gave a little history tour of the city as the sun was setting. He told us that his family has been gondoliers since the 1300's! It was so romantic and such a beautiful ride through the narrow canals.

We finished our evening with another....GELATO as we listened to the classic musicians in San Marco Piazza. A perfect ending to an unbelievable day. We're so sad to be leaving Venice, but exicted for our next stop...Cinque Terra.

Ciao!

We are now in Venice, but didn't blog yesterday so we'll cover our last day in Paris first.

We had enough time (so we thought) to go to the Louvre (biggest museum in the world) before getting on our night train to Venice. We stopped by the grocery store to grab a bagette, some cheese, and some wine so we could picnic just outside of the Louvre. This was by far the best picnic of our lives! Behind us was the Eiffel tower and in front of us was the beautiful Louvre! EVERYONE picnics in Paris and the ALL drink wine! It's quite a sight! We've never seen so many people drinking straight out of bottles before! We then headed into the Louvre where we got an audio headset since everything was labled in French. We made it through one exhibit (Italian) in about 2 hours. We passed through a couple others as we attempted to find our way out. It literally took us 30 minutes just to get out of the museum! The place is bigger than you can ever imagine!

After the museum, we took a 7:43pm train to Venice, a 14 hour train ride. We had read some poor reviews about experiences riding in shared coachettes (rooms), so we asked for the best we could get (4 person room instead of 6). Somehow we lucked out and we were the only ones in the room. Shortly after boarding, one of the employees came by and took our tickets and passports which was quite uncomfortable. This was the first time they were out of our sight! We were told we'd get them back in the morning (which we did). The train was a new experience. Walking back to the restuarant car was quite fun....with the swaying of the cars, we kept bouncing off the walls. If we would have been drunk it would have been more fun and could have blamed it on something else! It certainly wasn't the best sleep we've ever gotten, but it was sleep and it got us through the day today. The train stopped ~6 times and changed engines once. Needless to say there was lots of bumping, screeching, and about every other noise you can imagine. We arrived in Venice right on time though.

What can we say about Venice.....wow! This is the best place on our trip so far! The other cities were wonderful, but didn't hit us like Venice has! The only crappy part of the day was trying to find our hotel. It took about 2 hours simply because we had no idea how to navigate Venice and with the language barrier. The limited directions we did get only got us close. The building #'s aren't in order, making it even more confusing! Now that we've spent all day walking around the city, we are starting to get the hang of it. Basically, you just have to know where you are in relation to the major land marks. We went to the grand canal for lunch. You can order ala carte or off the menu. If you order off the menu, you get your choice of any pasta, one kind of meat/seafood, one kind of appetizer, and a desert. All for ~24 Euros. The food was SPECTACULAR! We swear the tomotoes must grow in different dirt over here or something because the sauce is to die for! The seafood is all fresh. We had gelato for desert and then stopped by another gelato stand about an hour later just because we just couldn't get enough How can you resist!

After lunch we walked around for hours, shopping, taking pictures, and just enjoying being here. Later on we went wine-bar hopping. We tried to start in Saint MArcs square, but for 15 Euros per person, we passed on that quickly. We found several places where we were both able to drink and have a free appetizer for 3.5 Euros per person. We had another amazing dinner....this time ala carte. We couldn't stomach another large meal.....though this one was still rather large.

Jenn just finished washing some clothes in the sink/tub....apparently all the laundary mats are closed on Saturday and Sunday is a holiday. Glad we didn't pack more cothes though because those backpacks got heavy looking for our hotel today!

Enjoy the pics! We certainly enjoyed taking them

Ciao!

Once again jet lag (ignored our alarm) ruled our morning today. We didn't post yesteday, as our hotel charges for Internet access, so we decided to conserve cash a little. Yesterday we hit Oxford street, the busiest street in London. The street is lined with every store imaginable from Gap to fantastic English shops with teas, local foods, etc. We then ran back to our hotel, gathered our backpacks, and headed for the train station. All we can say is the EuroStar train rocks! 178mph across England, the chunnel, and France was awesome. It went by so quick (a little more than 2 hours) and was the quietest/smoothest train ride you'll ever take.

Once we arrived in Paris, we were immediately lost. It took us a good 10 minutes to figure out "M" meant the metro rail line. Once we got a hang of the system, we started getting around pretty well. We popped out of the underground right by our hotel, with the Eiffel tower literally a couple hundred yards away. We can see it from the entrance to our hotel. The hotel isn't nothing to write home about, but it's in the sweetest location. For dinner we walked around for a good hour trying to find some place with outdoor seating and a view of the Eiffel tower. We ended up at a place that spoke no English. We were quite apprehensive at first, but worked our way through it. Once we were able to understand one of the items on the menu, the rest started to make sense. We had an AMAZING dinner (half lobster each sliced right down the middle), a bottle of wine, and an apple torte. The chardoney was by far the best we've ever had (maybe the location has something to do with it!).

Today we went back to the train station to figure out the rest of our travels to Italy. What a pain that was! First, trying to find the station, then trying to find where in the station to go, then the automatic machines wouldn't take our cards, so we finally went to a counter and were in and out in 5 minutes after standing in line for a while. After that we went to the church of Nortre Dame. Wow....you'll just have to see the pictures on that one. We put our loved ones in a rememberance book and lit a candle. Quite something to stand in such a place.

Tonight we had another amazing dinner and took the trip up the Eiffel tower. We went up like cattle and down like cattle....it's quite the process. The view is amazing of course. The pictures tell it all.

That's all for now. Bonjour!