Sorrento

Our travel day from Rome to Sorrento was a failure, but not for the reasons I had anticipated. On Thursday we had crammed ourselves into the Roman metro during the morning rush hour in order to get to the Vatican Museums in time for our scheduled tour. That experience had made us pretty fearful of the next day, when at approximately the same time we would be trying to go the same route in order to catch our scheduled bus to Naples, but this time with all of Our Luggage!

I might not have complained about Our Luggage recently. It’s terrifying. To be fair, my bag started out rather large, but it has GROWN, and Alan’s has too. Alan is also carrying around a camera bag and a duffle bag that is getting pretty full. I’m carrying around a full purse and sometimes a bag that holds my boots when I’m scared of putting my weight plus My Luggage’s weight on those brand-new heels. So we’re pretty obnoxious-looking when we travel from city to city.

Me triumphing over My Luggage as it tries to pull me backwards. Note that I am only succeeding because I am sitting.

My Luggage triumphing over me as I snail my way along the road. Note that there are no pictures of Alan with His Luggage because there is no way I could take a picture while concentrating on not falling over.

So the metro where we could barely fit our bodies was a pretty scary prospect for me with Our Luggage. But we didn’t have any problems! I’m sure we irritated some commuting Romans, but no one yelled at us and we made it to the train station in plenty of time. We transferred trains at the Naples station to get to Sorrento, and that’s where things fell apart.

The nice lady at the information booth in the Sorrento train station thought that the instructions given to us by the hostel/campground website were silly and meant that we would have to walk several blocks to catch the recommended bus. It was POURING RAIN and GLOOMY, so we took the nice lady’s advice and boarded a different bus. We missed our stop and were kicked off the bus by a particularly unhelpful driver in Sant’Agata about 35 minutes later. We waited an hour for a ride back to where we had started, where we waited for another hour or so, and then boarded another bus in the same direction of our first one. We finally made it to our destination, less than two kilometers away from the train station, four hours after we had arrived at the station. A whole day of transportation! What a waste!

Good thing that the Bay of Naples is pretty at night too!

We had originally planned to go to the island of Capri on Saturday, but I was keen on checking out Sorrento since we hadn’t been able to the day before, and it was such a windy day that we weren’t sure we wanted to spend our time at sea. We’ll just have to see Capri next time we come to Italy. J

It ended up being a kind of lame decision on our part. Sorrento’s streets full of tourist shops were only amusing for a few hours, and then we were ready to see something else. Luckily, Sorrento happens to have pastry shops and a few orange and lemon gloves downtown right there in between the hotels and restaurants. It’s also easy to get right up on the bay or catch some good views of the bright blue water surrounding the city. I can see why Sorrento is a popular tourist destination: It would be a beautiful place when the citrus trees are in bloom and when it’s warm enough to appreciate the ferocious sea breeze.

Cannolo break!