by Katherine

        So it seems I'm a little delayed in posting more cake pics. I should do it more often and probably just make more cakes cuz they are awesome!

by Katherine

      So Milan was really just a means to get to the airport and fly home since it's the closest big airport to the gem that is Cinque Terre. I didn't have a huge desire to visit the city; friends had told me there wasn't much in the way that was worth seeing. However, it allowed us to see the city, check it off our places visited, and then never need to come back (except potentially to the airport again). So our train got in at a train station quite a walk from the center of the city. On the outskirts, there was nothing of interest. The only thing worth noting was that we did see one of those amazing wine shops, like in Venice, that fills up a giant plastic bottle full of wine. Sadly, we were heading out of the country and we had so much crap to carry that giant bottles of wine oddly did not seem appealing. We also managed to find a Billa, a grocery store that my friends who studied abroad in Florance had practically considered a second home. I was able to find my friend Laura some spifferi cookies, her favorite Billa pastime. And I grabbed up some cheap troffie pasta to bring home with us. Not sure if it's been mentioned, but I should note that we bought an extra suitcase and filled it with pasta, wine, and other food. That's how I roll in Italy.

by Bradley

          On our last night in Cinque Terre we decided to go big since we were about to go home. We went with a four course meal jam packed with seafood!

          We started with a assortment of cold seafood including octopus salad, salmon, shrimp sardines and several other items. Each was fresh, interesting and unique and primed our appetites for more. As always, Katherine very much appreciated the octopus salad and there was even a separate seafood salad with some octopus too!

by Bradley

          Our last hike in Cinque Terre was a fairly brief one but we still wanted to hike between all the cities. The via dell'amore ("The Way of Love" an easy flat path from Riomaggiore to Manarola) was closed so we took another route from Manarola to Riomaggiore ascending nearly straight up, at times, above Manarola and then right back down again into Riomaggiore.

          We went to one town slightly outside of Cinque Terre called Portovenere. We took a ferry from Manarola to Portovenere and got to see the beautiful coastline along the way.

          Portovenere is a cool little town that has a castle (Doria Castle) sitting up on the hill and a few streets to walk through with food and shops.

by Katherine

          With seafood being so prevalent along the coast, I started to wonder if there was a such thing as putting octopus in pasta. Octopus was certainly all over menus everywhere in Cinque Terre, but never had I seen it in pasta, which to me seemed like an obvious and delicious combination. So I started searching the interwebs for such a thing, and amazingly, I fond an octopus pasta that a couple had had and written about on their blog. And the restaurant just happened to be in Manarola (yet another reason why Manarola is the best of the towns!).