Author Archives: samhopehansen

Monday 7/22 – Monday morning we left Florence and trained southward to our final destination on the Italian peninsula, Rome.  Our train pulled up to Termini Station in the early afternoon and from there we walked to Hotel Independienza.  Definitely a 1-2 star max “hotel” (I don’t understand why they can brand themselves as hotelsContinue reading “Part 6: Rome”

Friday 7/ 19 – Where did we leave off? Well, we safely made our train from Venice to Florence! This particular train was operated by Trenitalia, and was the nicest train we had been on thus far.  Upon arriving in Florence, we only had a short walk to our hostel; I tried to make aContinue reading “Part 5: Florence + Cinque Terre”

7/18 – We managed to pull ourselves together in time to catch our train over to Venice.  Upon our arrival to the Santa Lucia Station, we initially attempted to direct ourselves towards the new hostel using the directions we’d grabbed from their website.  The only issue here was that the directions were from the mainlandContinue reading “Part 4: Venice”

7/16 – Well, we made it to Milan finally! Hello Italia.  Although several randies tried to claim their seats were in our little train cubicle, we indeed arrived in one piece to the train station in Milan that night.  From there we got a taxi to Minas Hostel… Minas had a really nice staff andContinue reading “Part 3: Milan”

NICE – 7/15  – Monday at the crack of dawn, we sleepily checked out of St. Christopher’s Inn and made our first of three trains Nice bound.  Definitely slept through the first train ride- Bastille Day wears a person out I tell ya!  Despite having the train route from hell, we did eventually arrive inContinue reading “Part 2: Nice”

PARIS – So Friday, July 12th came very quickly and of course Cass and I hadn’t packed for our three-week backpacking adventure until the day of so that was special!  In an unfortunately hung-over, humid, and hurried state we stuffed our supposedly TSA regulation backpacks with as much as we possibly could.  A few hoursContinue reading “Backpacking Trip Part 1: Paris”