A good start & end - but the middle 🥴

The last two days have been so long and jam packed that I have been too tired to blog at the end of them. I'll try to catch up, but am not sure hoe successful I will be at it.

We had a great start to our day of commuting to Naples! We enjoyed our last cappuccino at our local cafe and then wheeled our bags to the train station in Piano di Sorrento.

We were, once again, riding the local commuter train and could have taken the "Express" train but it cost $15EUR/person. It didn't arrive any earlier than the regular train, but they assigned seats. We opted to spend $4.60 each, instead, thinking that there would be ample room on the train at 10:00am in the morning.

We were so wrong! We had to squeeze ourselves into the "handicapped" space at the back of the train. There were two large dogs with two guys sitting on the floor. One woman was synchrd in tight with all the wheelchair harnesses around her and her bags to hold them stationary! It looked hilarious. She was so tied in that she couldn't even get out once the seats opened up. 🤣

All I can tell you is that it required more core strength than I had to stay erect during the swaying of the train and all the starts and stops. I didn't dare step bacl lest I hit the dog ... which I was warned, would bite me.

Thankfully, about 30 minutes into our 75 minute ride, oodles of seats opened up when people got off at the Pompeii stop.

We were seated comfortably after that, but at one point, I had to take a picture of a woman seated on top of her bags

We talked about walking from the Napoli station to the hotel because it is only 3kms, but the cobblestone can be unforgiving. They do provide some suitcase trails along the main streets in Piano di Sorrento, but we weren't certain about the walking directions and conditions here in Naples.

So, given that Uber only operates in some of the biggest cities in Italy, we opted to get a taxi to eliminate all the walking to the hotel. It sounded like a solid idea, however, our cab driver quoted us $40 ... which seemed steep to me. My Rome2Rio app on my phone said it should have been about $20, but I didn't feel like haggling with him. Once we got in the car, he said "cash". I realized then that he wasn't even going to turn the meter on!!! Yikes. At that moment, I knew we had become the quintessential "naive tourists" that he was going to chuckle about stiffing over supper tonight!

But wait ... it gets even worse. He drove us for 10 minutes and then dropped us off in a square near the old town. He said we had to walk ... just "up there" because it was pedestrian traffic only from that point.
It turned into a 30 minute walk through the maze of the old town of Napoli.

At one point, the cobblestone grabbed my suitcase right out from under me and fell flat on the road. Fortunately, I stayed vertical. We put the address into google maps and it should have been 350meters to the hotel. Google was cutting in and out because of the narrrow lanes and buildings and we ended up being rerouted a few times! I stopped and asked for help twice. We were both so fuming mad by the time we found our way to the garage door entrance to the hotel. As I write this, I'm still not sure if we arrived at the main door or the car parkade at the back of the hotel??? Wait NOW ... I might be a naive tourist, but if this hotel has a parkade ... you can absolutely, totally and without a doubt DRIVE straight to it!! 😠

It's a really lovely old hotel with oodles of character ... and ... as we are sipping some wine and enjoying a charcuterie board on our little deck, we are back to enjoying Italy. That is, until I made the mistake of checking if Uber was available in Naples. It turns out it IS! Guess how much??? $12 to $18EUR. I wasn't instantly annoyed again. It took quite a few sips of this amazing local wine before I was ready to forgive the cab driver. It's one thing to more than double the fare ... it's another insult to not even drop us where we asked to be taken!

Fortunately, our room was ready by 1:00pm. It's a good thing we had extra time to cool off (metaphorically and literally!) before meeting our group at 4pm to start the tour! We ordered some wine and cheese and had some time to sit our little deck overlooking the pool. We even figured out how to work the air conditioning ... I think! 🤞

One of the best parts of being here, now, is that I get to hang up my role as tour guide for a while. I am looking forward to someone else guiding the way for the next six days!! I seriously hoping that the weather forecast for rain will be WRONG. It is clouding over as I write .... so ... who knows??

We dawned our trusty walking shoes and met our fellow 'walkers' at 4pm in the lobby. We've got a great group ... several people from South Africa, one from Zimbabwe, two couples from the US (one Florida and one California), one couple that live in both Whistler, Canada and South of San Francisco.

We enjoyed getting to know them over a short walk through the old city of Nsples and then over dinner. We were treated to three different kinds of pizza ... we learned the tradional Margherita was named after the queen back then.

It was a great day, all in all ... and ... I felt like we we were off to a great start with our walking tour! We tucked into bed about 11:pm.Weiterlesen