Sunday & Monday, September 15 & 16, 2013

I neglected to mention that our room is DOWN 4 flights of stairs!  We are supposed to move after tonight, but we have decided to stay only 3 nights in Sorrento and go to Rome earlier so we have 5 nights in Rome.  The hotel in Rome had availability.  We'll just stay in the room we are in here for two more nights and I'll count stairs like G-ma.

Today was Herculaneum day -- or, rather (as an Italian man corrected me) Er-co-lano.  We walked DOWN the mountain for the 20 or 25 minutes to the train station after all the buses passed us up while we were standing at the bus stop by our hotel.  No one told us until later that we were supposed to hail them!  Getting the train ticket & getting on the train was easy enough and we arrived in Erculano about 50 minutes later after about 10 stops.  We sat across from a young couple in their 20's from Australia who were backpacking across Europe, starting in Singapore actually, for 10 months.  We had a nice chat until they got off at Pompeii.  We've met a lot of Australians and English on this trip.

Yes, now a 20 minute walk DOWN to "Scavi Ercolano" and another 5 to the ticket booth, all the while looking down on the relatively compact area of excavated ruins.  I'm glad we chose this and not Pompeii.  Later, after talking to people who had done both, everyone seemed to prefer Herculaneum.  It was pretty incredible.  No, we didn't see dead people.  They were all taken to the archeological museum in Naples.  We did see bones, but not a close view. But we saw houses, frescoes, and some beautiful marble and mosaics.  Amazing that there is so much known about what all this is and I can't imagine how painstaking it must have been an still is to excavate all this.  We saw a loaf of bread and timbers and walked through people's homes -- creepy and rather irreverent to me.  The most poignant of all was looking from the ruins, up through the poor city of Erculano, with apartment building after apartments building filled with people, and up to Mount Vesuvius, thinking about where these people would go if it ever erupted again?

We got dinner on the way back in Sorrento before we hoofed it again back up the mountain to the hotel, stopping to get wine and lemoncello, our staples.  Sandy's pedometer says we walked almost 6 miles today!  Yes, I can feel every one of those miles tonight!
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Monday

We're tired.  We slept late. There was a thunder shower last night -- rather neat.  I woke up seeing the lightning in the distance over the mountain.  We were sleeping soundly with a fan and the French windows (like French doors) opened up.  No bugs.  The air was cool and wonderful and smelled of rain.  Ah...zzzz.  The hand towels are linen towels but the bath towels are terry cloth (last hotel they were linen too).  We have had soap and shampoo all along but no wash cloths.  Sandy brought two.  All the bathrooms had hair dryers, but I had a hard time drying my hair with the last one -- puny.  Fortunately I brought one that works directly on this current.  Our bathroom is pretty big in Sorrento so we did laundry last night in the tub which has a shower removable shower head in it about knee height.  The floors of all the hotel rooms have been tile -- no rugs.  So much marble in Italy.  No such thing as wall to wall carpeting.

Today we just took it easy, walking downtown after a lazy morning to stroll the old part of town, have some gelato, and look in the shops.  Lemons, lemons, lemons.  Lemons and olives and mozzarella cheese and fresh tomatoes.  Yum.  Amazing how much time you can waste when you work at it!  What a lovely day.  Nice breeze, sunny, not too hot -- no sweater yet except maybe at night.  Nice to take time to do much of nothing.  Did I mention the incredible view on our mountain walks?  The Tyrrhenian Sea way below us and Mt.Vesuvius framed right there in the distance but not far.  The little fishing area where we had dinner last night WAY down there. We opted not to take the bus down the other side of the Amalfi coast even though it's supposed to be gorgeous.  We have plenty of gorgeous right here.  Tomorrow is a driving day & we expect it to be rather stressful.  We've decided to leave our little car at the smaller Ciampino airport in Rome and take a taxi to our hotel.  Sandy gets to drive us OUT of Sorrento to Rome since I did the long drive IN a few days ago. We are turning in early tonight, of course after our lemoncello (just for me now -- Sandy's tired of it and has gone back to wine).