I'm gonna be honest with you... I've not been as diligent about taking a photo a day since we got back from Italy, and at this point I'm making up day numbers to go with photos just so a post can be loosely related to the project. I'm still trying to catch up, it's been challenging trying to find enough time to do some shooting and editing right now, and when I do, every time I sit down in front of this monitor, I'm buried under a mountain of honeymoon images. In my defense, I've been posting more than an image at a time with the Italy stuff, so that has to count for something, right? Right. Thanks for being agreeable. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, though... I finished up the images from Vernazza, the third of five cities we graced with our presence in Italy, so I'm over the proverbial hump with only 2 more destinations left to sort through and edit. With that in mind, I'll leave you with some of my favorites from Vernazza in the Cinque Terra region. To see the ridiculous views from our balcony during this stay, check this previous post. Here's the bedroom chandelier in the "Honeymooner's Paradise" room we stayed at in a B&B waaaay up near the top of the city.

Since it was the off season, many restaurants in small Cinque Terra towns were closed for the winter. Not so cool. What was cool, though, is that because the dining choices were limited, we ran into and got to know some American couples while we were in Vernazza at dinner. John & Megan (on the left) were from Philly, and Kristen & Eric (middle) were from somewhere I don't remember, but they were on their way to do a two year mission trip in South Africa after their stop in Italy. We told 'em about the crazy number of steps and the awesome view from our room, and they wanted to check it out, so we all hiked back up to our room after dinner.

Funny that Kylie was reading this book about a woman's crazy experience & subsequent near melt-down regarding the stress and chaos of planning a wedding after we were already hitched. BTW, notice she's in bed with a long sleeve shirt on... we had no heat in our room the first night, and the overnight temps outside were in the 30's. There was some serious cuddlin' going on that night.

So, we'd heard about these trails that you could hike between the 5 coastal cities of the Cinque Terra region. Most of them were closed during the off season, but Kylie and I went for a little walk and found what we thought might be one of the few open trails between Vernazza and Monterosso. Over 2 hours and about a bagillion uphill steps later, we were sadly misinformed by some locals who live up in the boonies (they had to be descendants of the Sherpas that guide climbers up Mt. Everest) who we're pretty sure told us through their broken English that Monterosso was a 2-3 hour hike in another direction. Guess I shouldn't have dropped out of the Boy Scouts in 4th grade before they covered basic map reading skills. Basically, we walked way up in the hills only to turn around and walk right back down. Don't let Kylie's stance in the image below fool you... she was just as winded as I was on the way up... she just wasn't nearly as dramatic.

See the top of the hill way up behind this church tower? That's where we'd hiked to before realizing we were headed to the land of nowhere and came back down.

Later in the day we resorted to more certain travel methods and took the train to Monterosso, which is where the remainder of the images in this post were photographed.

I love this image of Kylie looking out over the water. Sunset light is gorgeous and my favorite light if the day.