Cinque Terre, Italy

In the next few blog posts, I will detail one of the most romantic, quaint, and colorful places in the world (the first two adjectives were my idea, but “colorful” comes from this article.

You can kinda see what that article was talking about, right? 
Ignore the "rainbow," that's the result of me fighting with my
camera and my camera winning.

It’s called the Cinque Terre, meaning “five towns.”  I just got back from my honeymoon there last month.  On the train, my husband and I didn’t know what to expect.  We had just spent a delightful day in Lucca, in the Tuscany area of Italy, and could not bare to part with the fabulous little city. 

We were on a hot, sweaty train to Riomaggiore, the southernmost town of the Cinque Terre, where we would be staying for the next week.  This was definitely the hottest train I had ever been on in my life and I was about to start complaining (even though my husband was the one who carried three bags while I carried only a purse) when I saw this:

At most train stations I've been, the main attraction is
homeless people, but not here!

That is the train station below.  It’s right on the Ligurian Sea.  The crystal-clear, beautifully sparkling Ligurian Sea.  I had never seen anything like it in my life, and I live in South Florida, where people around the world come for the beaches.  All five of the towns are directly on the sea and look like they might crumble into the water at any moment.

You can't make this stuff up.

Most people come to Cinque Terre for the day.  We stayed for a week.  We watched tour groups zip through the five towns in a few hours.  We saw one of those tour groups take a picture of a cat at the train station.  Sometimes people on tour groups are crazy, didn't they see the beautiful water?


I sent myself this postcard to remember how truly insane
it is to take a picture of a cat when you're in the most
beautiful place on Earth.

As for myself, I could stay a few lifetimes and never grow tired of it.  And believe it or not, it was extremely economical, starting right at town one.  In fact, I can think of five really good reasons it was economical, but that's for another post!