Right after giving my big talk at the Login conference I was off to Italy with a friend that came all the way from Hong Kong to visit and travel together. We flew to Milan where we spent a lovely evening hanging out wit my sister and her friends, playing guitar and my ukulele on their beautiful terrace. Even got to share some of my favorite Lithuanian songs.
The next day we got a ride to the mountains where we started what was to be a whole week of hiking. However, having checked the weather forecast which predicted rain for most of the week with thunderstorms at the end to top it off, we weren't so confident in being able to fulfill our initial plans. Nonetheless, we bought enough food to last us 3-4 days and began walking. It took us all of 10 minutes to get lost, confused by the way the trail markings (or lack of). Luckily an Italian family happened to pass us and pointed us in the right direction.
The hike was incredible, the views breathtaking and so we made sure to take a number of stops to just be in the moment and take it all in. I realized how much I had missed being in the mountains and that I need more of this in my life. More of just getting away from my busy life and taking the time to just be with my thoughts with no distractions.
Going down we took a path nobody else seemed to walk along and we quickly learned why. The slope was quite steep with parts of the path being boulders where you had to hold on to metal chains to get down which were quite a challenge with our big packs. We managed to get down safe and sound in the end despite some slips on the way.
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| yup, this is what we went down... |
Once we got down we needed to find some water as our supplies were low. We rang the bell at this huge house not really expecting anyone to come out and as we were about to leave the gates opened, the residents came out and when we asked for water they happily gave us some :) It was getting quite late at this point, started to rain and we weren't sure where we were heading so we set up camp in a field behind some trees. While cooking dinner I was getting a bit paranoid that someone was gonna tell us to pack up and leave, but luckily that didn't turn out to be the case.
The next day we woke up to fog and rain. This meant we needed to rethink our plans as we weren't too excited about hiking for a week under these conditions. We decided to go visit the towns by the lake which you could reach easily by ferry, have a more relaxing day and head back to Milan to regroup and plan out the rest of the week.
Spending time by the lake and in the towns was a lot of fun even with some annoying circumstances getting in the way to fully enjoy it. One of us was even able to cross off some things from their bucket list ;))
