Trip from Cinque Terre to Venice (5/9/08)

Well the sound of the alarm really was wretched come morning. I could barely drag myself out of bed and Mom and Mrs. Sitler weren't much better. While in the middle of repacking my bag up Mrs. Sitler suddenly said, "The train we are supposed to take leaves in 5 minutes!" We rushed to get everything finished. However, getting 3 suitcases down 100 stairs that early in the morning was not easy. Mrs. Sitler couldn't carry her suitcase down the stairs so I carried both hers and mine down as fast as I could and then ran back up as fast as I could to help get mom's. Mom still wasn't quite ready and I knew that there was no possible way we could make the train unless it was fairly late. I ran down the stairs with mom's suitcase and we ran all the way to the train station. More stairs to get to the platform. We found that the train was delayed by 15 minutes and were we ever relieved to hear that. My lungs were burning and I thought that I was going to keel over any second. I'm not exactly used to running 300 steps first thing in the morning. We were able to make it all the way to Pisa on the train before the 9am beginning of the train strike. Apparently there was a train stopping in Pisa around 9:30 and so if we could catch that, we would be able to make it to our next connection to Florence after the 1:00 end of the train strike. (we were glad to have found that the train strike was not going to go past 1pm) Were we ever thankful for that. When we arrived in Florence, we still had a few hours to spare before our next train so we decided to do some sightseeing. Kristen and Kim went to wander around the entire city, but the rest of us we not feeling so brave. We didn't want to wander too far and then have to rush to catch our train. We had done enough running in train stations to suit us. We went and saw a cathedral and shopped around a bit. We stopped at a pizza place and ordered some pizza by the ounce. I found some chicken, green onion pizza that looked fabulous. Well until I bit into it. Apparently what I thought was chicken was actually tuna fish. Oh well. It wasn't as bad as it could have been I guess. We made the train in plenty of time and enjoyed our leisurely trip to Venice. After we arrived at the train station we made way to the vaporettos. It was odd to have a main transportation system of a boat. It also took a little bit of getting used to as seats weren't readily available and there wasn't anything to hang on to while we were standing. We managed to make it to our stop and found our hotel quite easily. We had to laugh when there were a bunch of stairs up to the main office. The hotel was beautiful with a bunch of antique furniture everywhere. We went out to walk around to get a view of the city and find Kristen and Kim's hotel. The crowds were outrageous and we ended up losing mom and Mrs. Sitler somewhere along the way. We looked everywhere, but were unable to find them. After finding Kristen and Kim's hotel, we went back to ours to find Mom and Mrs. Sitler waiting for us. We decided to have a meeting place from that point on in case we got separated. We found a little restaurant and enjoyed a full dinner. At that point in the night we were all so tired we decided to go our separate ways and go to bed. In our hotel room we didn't have our own bathroom so we had to share one down the hall. A little tough if someone was in the shower and you had to wait your turn behind a person or two. It didn't actually end up being too much of a problem which I was grateful for. We all fell asleep almost immediately upon climbing into and looked forward to what the morning might bring us.