Can we do the whole thing on foot?
This morning I missed the train. It was bound to happen at some point knowing my time management skills, and today was the day. Everyone else made it, and I got to the platform as the door closed. Luckily, our first stop was Riomaggiore for the Via del Amore walk, which we had to select a time slot for. Our time slot was 9:00 am, and my train had me there on time to meet up with the others. I caught another Pigeon before we started the walk. In Riomaggiore, we ran into Kaleena, who had also booked the 9:00 am time slot. I picked up my pigeon friend again to show Kaleena.
Via del Amore
The Via del Amore took us to Manarola, where we discovered that the trail to Corniglia was still closed due to a landslide. We had all decided to try to walk all the way to Monterosso, so we continued our trek on an alternate route via Volstra. This trail is significantly more challenging. It is only 5.4 km, but has over 300 meters of elevation gain in under 2 km. It was also very hot and there wasn’t much shade, so this portion of the day was a bit miserable.
Once we got to Volstra we grabbed some water and popsicles to cook off, and I had some focaccia with onion & olive oil for lunch.
We walked down to Corniglia, which was much nicer than the way up, and then Kyler, Rachelle and Paula decided they didn’t want to walk anymore and headed off for the train station. However, Kaitlin and I were not ready to give up. At this point, we were doing it for sure. We carried on straight away to Vernazza. This section of the trail was really beautiful and there was lots of shade. We even found a plum tree on the way!
Vernazza was beautiful from above. This was the town I was most looking forward to. Once we got into the town my first thoughts were “holy over tourism!” My feet were getting super sore and it was cooking out so I threw my hiking boots off and went for a dip in the sea. The water is like an oven here, it’s incredible. Kaitlin looked like she was getting impatient so I quickly dried off and we carried on to Monterosso. This section felt like it carried on forever, but I saw some neat stuff like some cool birds with blue under their wings and a kiwi plant. Eventually, we arrived in Monterosso where an Italian man made fun of us for not walking in the early morning or evening. We wandered around a little and sat down at a bar to grab some pizza and celebrate our accomplishment. I don’t know if it was any good or not. I was starving so it didn’t matter. I’ve never seen Kaitlin eat so fast before! I was so exhausted that I think I left all my change on the table. Whoops. Hopefully I made our servers day. We got on the next train to Riomaggiore, where we briefly bumped into Adam and Lisa, and then we went to watch the sunset. Kaitlin asked me if I would be mad at her if she didn’t swim. I said yes. We both went for a swim. It was awesome.
Once the sun went down we managed to get ourselves on the train to La Spezia and walked back to our Loft.
I did 40,000 steps again today.