Cinque Terre: The Land of Cat Fights and Hiking to New Heights

Over Columbus Day weekend, I went to Cinque Terre Italy with a group of 8 girls for a Girls' Weekend. We were going with the intent of celebrating Gretchen and Danielle’s birthdays, and managed to have a weekend that I will remember for the rest of my life.



I must admit that before this trip, I felt like this place was getting the best of me. I am not even sure why or how but this environment is really different than anything that I have been exposed to… ever. But the weekend reminded me that no matter how crazy life can get sometimes, all you need are some goofy times, loud laughs, refreshing "real talk"(perferibly on the kitchen floor), and great lifelong-memory-making-sessions to remember what matters in life.


Cinque Terre is made up of five towns on the coast of Italy and it is full of good food (real Italian food and seafood… yum!), great wine and Lemonicello, amazing views, and lots of hiking. It really is an unique place that should be on everyone’s list of places that they should go to sometime in their life.

The funny thing is that I feel that if I tried to relive some of the stories from that weekend they would be lost in translation. The weekend consisted of a bar fight where a gin and tonic was thrown in a girl's face, late night Lemonicello cat calls, Kelly getting attacked by a cat, talks on the kitchen floor, and walks through the paths of CT late at night with no shoes on. So it might truly have been a weekend where you “just had to be there.” But even though only 4 of us girls ventured there with cameras, about 800 pictures were taken. So I will let some of the pictures tell most of the story.

The reason so many pictures were taken is that we did start the weekend by Danielle telling us that she has noticed that when Italian women take pictures they really pose, usually in overly dramatic positions, and then their admiring husbands/boyfriends will let out a “perfecto” if they captured the seductive mood just right. That was all we needed to be convinced that the weekend would be filled with as many “perfecto” poses as possible.

Each of the five towns has its own personality and it is really fun to hike from one town to the other. The first day of hiking, Gretch, Liza, Kelly, and I did get a little tired of hiking so we played a small game of Truth and Dare during the hike. The game pretty much consisted of us drinking a bottle of Meloncello, asking random people odd questions, and Kelly picking up a stray cat that attacked her... but she got away with only a few scratches.

There was also an American bar near our hotel, so we went there both nights. The first night I do believe that we crashed a private party and got into a small bar brawl and the second night we met two men from Ohio that were traveling through Italy for two weeks.

There were actually a lot of Americans in Cinque Terre and one of the high points was that a couple stopped in to the restaurant we were eating at for the birthday celebration. They thanked the girls for all the sacrifices that they make being Army wives (all the girls are married to Army men except for me and Kelly). It was very touching and it was nice for someone to verbalize to these women that the daily sacrifices they make do not go unnoticed. I can't imagine being married and being away from my husband as much as military wives are, so it is nice when that is recognized by someone.

Overall, it was an amazing weekend and just plain unbelievable. I will leave with one of my favorite findings from the weekend. There is a walk of love from one town to the other where people put up locks and write things about their loved ones. This is one of the drawings and it says, "The brave may not live forever, but the cautious never live at all"