Rome, Italy, Europe

Today was an early rise for us as we had a lot of traveling ahead of us. It was today that made me really thankful that Ryan agreed to drive in Italy! We first drove 2.5 hours down to Pompeii which was the easy part. We spent a few hours walking around the ruins of Pompeii which was pretty impressive. It’s amazing how big this city was, considering it was built in 2nd century BC. Plus, it had been through an earthquake in 62 AD and then of course the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The amount of stuff that was still intact was remarkable. It’s also amazing how many people are still living RIGHT next to Vesuvius. I know it’s dormant now, but I don’t think I’d be too keen on taking the risk.

After walking around in the 90 degree heat and sun, we were dying for a bottle of water and some lunch. We had parked at a place called “I Due Cesari” that had a restaurant and bar attached. It was 3 Euros per hour to park, but the deal we’d been told about was that if you eat at their restaurant, you can park for free. What they didn’t tell us was that your bill had to come to 40 Euros ($55) or more, which for two people is pretty expensive for what we were eating. Well “luckily” for us, their prices were so high that our meal came to 40.82. I made a huge mistake by going with the Walk Disney Pizza which was listed as having sausage and potatoes. That turned out to be pizza dough with no sauce, covered in cheese, hot dogs and French fries! No joke, see the picture below. I could only eat half of it, it was nasty. The waiter asked why I’d only eaten half and I told him that I didn’t like it, and wasn’t expecting hot dogs and French fries on it. He sounded compassionate, but decided to charge me for the pizza anyway. Nice. This is a real tourist trap, so if you ever go to Pompeii, make sure you avoid this place!

We then started the difficult part of the trip, driving along the Amalfi coast. This sounds like a nice leisurely drive down the coast right…wrong! It was a death-defying drive up and over mountains and down cliffs. It wouldn’t have been so bad if there weren’t cars and buses coming around every hairpin turn at the same time as us. Ryan was stressing just trying to keep us alive, and I was stressing because I had absolutely no control of what was happening. Lucky for me Ryan is an excellent driver and got us down there in one piece. Amalfi is very similar to Portofino, just not AS MUCH money. Pretty close though. So we walked down the shore, got some ice cream and tried to unwind a bit.

After a couple hours, Ryan was ready to drive again so we started to head up the treacherous trail they call a “road”, I would beg to differ. We consulted Tom Tom and found that the closest petrol station was 2.8 miles away, which would take 10 minutes. Since we were running on fumes, and now driving uphill, we thought it would be a great idea to get there before trying to head back to Rome. Now I don’t want it to sound like I’m dissing Tom Tom because the woman in there has been absolutely spot on with all of her directions for this whole trip. BUT, where she said there would be a gas station, there wasn’t. There was a cliff. And that didn’t help us at all. Since we were already driving west on this single track road, we had no option but to continue driving and hope we would come upon a petrol station VERY soon. Luck was on our side again and a mile and a half down the road was a station. So we were able to breath easy about the petrol situation, but we still had these roads and mountains to get through. By this point, Ryan was driving like a Formula 1 pro, and 4 hours later we made it back to Rome. Phew, that was exhausting!!