Amazingly...towards the end of this train ride, the ocean popped into view! beautiful! we got off the train in the village of Riomaggiore, which is the southernmost village in Cinque Terre. our directions were pretty random: walk through a tunnel and then up the street. ok. so we did it! and ran into the office where we gave them some money, and then got walked UP to our room. and i do mean up...the building itself was up two small flights of stairs from the stre...

Today we had to leave Florence...major bummer!! we had time to get some more free breakfast and then amble over to the airport. We hopped on a train going to Pisa. We had heard that it wasnt worth too much of a stop, apparently the 5 hours we had planned 1 hour one too many...so we planned on dropping off our bags, seeing the tower and then getting back on the train! on the train we made a new friend...a guy from Russia who kept talking and talking regardless of...

Today we woke up and enjoyed the amazing free breakfast at the hostel outside in the garden terrace. This just makes me excited for summer! We took off in the direction of the Palazzo Vecchio, making only 1 stop on the way for gelato (good any time of the day!) The Plazzo was government offices and a palace during the 1400-1700s, and we took a Secret Passageways tour of it. It was so neat! The tour took us into small rooms covered in art and behind some of the p...

today was our first full day in florence...and we got to start it with a free breakfast! they even had a menu to choose from (we'll ignore that my 'french toast' was really more like toast covered in scrambled eggs)... after breakfast we hopped onto a free tour given by the hostel with a really cute italian girl that showed us around the main sites of the city for about 3 hours. here was the takeaway message: Medici Family rules over all of florence...dont mess w...

First off, I want to tell everyone that there will not be any new pictures for awhile. At our last hostel, I got a virus on my camera card while trying to load pictures. I quickly went to buy a new card, but I don't know what is going to happen with my last card, and now we are too scared to try on any other computers. Good news is that we will be back in the states in a few days, so this site will be overloaded with pictures soon. So patience! Today started wit...