Italy Vacation - Part 2 Sorrento

We left Venice in the morning for a full day of highway food and Italian highway taxes.  We were driving south along the coast of the Adriatic Sea.  We only got a few glimpses of the sea though, not as many as we would like.

We noticed a couple of things on this day:

- Italians like road construction.
- Italian road construction crews like tunnels.
- Brian wants a divorce so he can travel with Italian football hooligans full-time.
- You will lose your retirement savings if you buy diet coke in Italian gas stations.

One shock that we had was that Italy's mountains aren't the only big, snow capped Alps.  The whole country north to south is mountainous and we had several views of large, snow capped peaks as we worked south.  We cut over from Vasto towards Naples and crossed this divide.  This area of Italy is desolate and relatively poor.  There was also a difference in middle ages defensive strategy.  In Slovakia, castles are built on top of hills with the town down below.  In Italy, the entire town is built on top of the hill.

Once we crossed the country, we entered the chaos that is Naples.  We drove all the way through Naples (not necessarily the nicest of towns) and wound our way up to Sorrento which is out towards the Isle of Capri.  The roads got incredibly small and crowded with scooters.  Across two days in Sorrento, we personally were hit by two pedestrians and saw one pedestrian get hit.

Our hotel was a B&B we found which was excellent....our first turn into it was pretty poor though.  We turned into a dark garage entry under the sign of our hotel and this turned out to be the basement of another hotel.  It was so tight that we had to send everyone out of the basement to move the van back and forth to get out.  That poor clutch smelled for days.  We checked in and explored the grounds - lots of fruit trees.  We took the hotel's recommendation for a local family restaurant that was pretty good - though the waitstaff was more interested in the Napoli football game on that night than us.  We wrapped up dinner with a limoncello which was perfection in a shot glass.

It was raining and raining hard when we woke up the next day (a Monday morning).  We ate our breakfast and decided to take the long way to Pompeii which was our primary destination since it was raining.  We then drove to Almafi which was breathtaking.  Lots of great views and unique houses.  By now, Brian was putting Slovak driving skills to good use and taking advantage of the slow, polite (not) southern Italians.  Pictures barely describe the landscape along the coast.

We went up to Pompeii, in a somewhat sketchy part of Naples as we began to get flagged down by gentlemen who didnt really want to get us a great parking spot.  We found the pay parking for Pompeii and after a quick lunch, went in.  We nearly had Pompeii to ourselves as it was a Monday afternoon in February even with good weather.  Pompeii stretched on forever and we took our time looking around.  The boys liked it very much as we learned how the ancient Roman empire lived (hot tubs, cooking pots, stepping stones in the street and lots of prostitution).

After a long few days traveling - we hit up a grocery store for some bread, meat and cheese for dinner and met Brian's need for parmesan cheese.  The hotel had some great common areas for us to use as well.

The next day (now a Tuesday), we packed up and checked out and headed out into Naples' rush hour traffic.  We commanded the road in our French minivan with Austrian plates, or not.  We tried the one road up Mt. Vesuvius we knew of and were turned back about halfway up...apparently there are two roads and we chose poorly.  We then had to go into Torre del Greco and look for signs...a few mintues of turning down streets that we were sure only going to end with 6 missing American tourists, we found the road up to the top.  We drove up and hiked the last bit (300 meters elevation gain) to the top.  The caldera was a lot deeper and more active than what we expected.  Great views of Naples, Sorrento and Capri too.

After hiking down, we did road side grill again for lunch and hit the road to Roma...to be continued

To see our complete pictures, click here and here.