Saturday, Aug. 17-

Ooh dehydration headache. We are out of Rome now and water costs so now is when you decide if you want to be dehydrated, or drink normally and run the risk of being on a bus in the middle of nowhere for several hours and then needing a washroom. I have chosen dehydration.

We met Dillon+Renae at the airport YAY and quickly had pizza there before we got on FlixBus for the drive down to Naples. The drive was full of terracotta and mustard colored houses and long driveways lined with cypress trees and towns on hillsides. We also slept a big part of it:) We stayed at the same hostel we used when we were here 5 years ago, Hostel of the Sun. I washed some clothes and hung them outside on the balcony and then we walked to Pizzeria con Cucina Ntretella for supper. Most of the restaurants here are just tables and crates on the street and very few can you eat inside. We ate under string lights and with hanging laundry above us and people going in and out of their homes. We meandered around the cobblestone streets after supper, past little alleys full of motos and arguing couples and tiny shops full of cannolis and croissants. We are surrounded by ever changing smells of the city: laundry soap, garlic, pizza, cigarette smoke (the amount of people that smoke here is insane), rotten garbage, and whiffs of stink from people who have been baking in the humidity all day. I love all of it. We got gelatos before heading back for night.

Sunday, Aug. 18-

We woke up to a thunderstorm and rain drops on the windows. We left our air-conditioned room(sadly) this morning and walked thru light rain to the train station, stopping for cappuccino and croissants on the way. How do these people survive on this amount of bread, I always wonder. But everybody you see is having the same thing so they must be on to something. We took a 40 minute train ride out of Napoli Centrale to Pompeii and dropped our bags in storage before heading in. Since it had rained it was cloudy and much cooler than it has been so we were thankful.

I love Pompeii. I wish I could convey the impressiveness of it, although I get that lots of people aren’t into history like me either. As soon as you walk in you choose any direction you feel like walking and away you go. The streets are made up of uneven big stones, with little flecks of white marble scattered thru. I found out that the white marble was used as reflectors to see where the road was as you walked or drove your chariot down the streets at night.

Another interesting thing I learned about the roads was that these sets of raised stones in the middle of the road were for people to cross without stepping in the mud or muck. These are all over Pompeii and were necessary because of the constant overflow of aqueduct and rainstorm runoff and the lack of good under-street sewage. They were tall enough to keep people out of the water, but short enough that chariots could still go over them. You can see the wagon ruts all over the city too.

We also visited lots of houses, temples, restaurants, and the Garden of Fugitives where you can see the plaster casts of a group of people who died in that garden, many of them children. We spent several hours in Pompeii before picking our bags back up. There are so many more interesting facts but you should know them already and if you don’t, here you go.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pompeii

We took a little train ride down to Sorrento and had lunch and checked into our AirBnb early afternoon. We took naps and then took a bus along the steep, windy mountain road to Positano. We took the Amalfi Coast road another time we were in Italy and it’s so crazy. Full of hairpin curves and tight corners and oh yes. A short-tempered Italian man driving the bus at ridiculous speeds. Some of the corners are so tight that people in their cars had to try to back up because the bus was taking up the curve. On one side you have vehicles so close they nearly scrape, and on the other side straight down the cliffs is the Tyrrhenian Sea, 1500 feet or so below. I remember reading a quote from an essay John Steinbeck published in 1953 that describes Italy traffic to a tee.

“To an American, Italian traffic is at first just down-right nonsense. It seems hysterical, it follows no rule. You cannot figure what the driver ahead or behind or beside you is going to do next and he usually does it. But there are other hazards besides the driving technique. There are the motor scooters, thousands of them, which buzz at you like mosquitoes. There is a tiny little automobile called ‘topolino’ or ‘mouse’ which hides in front of larger cars; there are gigantic trucks and tanks in which most of Italy’s goods are moved; and finally there are assorted livestock, hay wagons, bicycles, lone horses and mules out for a stroll, and to top it all there are the pedestrians who walk blissfully on the highways never looking about. To give this madness more color, everyone blows the horn all the time. This deafening, screaming, milling, tire-screeching mess is ordinary Italian highway traffic.”

We had seafood and pasta at a place in Positano with lovely views of the sea and climbed an obscene amount of steps back up to the bus stop. We looked later and had climbed around 40 flights. The stairs were not a high point in my life. We got back to our place around 10 after another eventful bus ride back.

Also of interest. We were asked by a lady from Kuwait, now moved to New York, if we were Mennonites and had a little discussion with her. We also visited with a really nice young couple from Long Island. They had been to Florence and we are going there in a few days so they gave us recommendations and also Morgan and the guy talked about shirts. Then on the train we heard the people behind us talking about Sacramento and connected with them over how bad Merced is. Haha. In the airport we visited with a man wearing a Saskatchewan Roughriders shirt  which was disappointing but he and his wife were very friendly so yes. It’s always interesting seeing who you meet up with.

Xo cheyenne linn