paestum


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Europe » Italy » Campania » Paestum
June 20th 2015
Published: September 13th 2015
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Took an early morning boat ride from Positano to Salerno. Quick and easy. There weren't too many people on the trip and staying up top is perfectly fine if you have an motion sickness issues and also to avoid the gas smell of being below. It's about a 15 minute walk from the docks to the train station. We had already purchased all of our regional train tickets in Naples, but there are kiosks and workers here too. Just remember that you may need to validate the ticket before getting on the train (ours were prevalidated by the machine). We had a light snack and a lovely goodbye to Sarah at a coffee shop on the strip just around the corner from the train station. If you do not have toilet paper or napkins, you will need to either getting on a non-regional train that is not due to depart the station before you can finish up in the onboard restroom or use one before you come to the train station. The bathrooms at the station are DISGUSTING and have no toilet paper and clearly never have any and from what I could tell the regional trains DO NOT have on board bathrooms.

The trip to Paestum was easy. The trains were PACKED. We got a seat about halfway there. We booked at Portasirena Agriturismo as it was the shortest distance to walk with all our gear and bonus it had a real pool! The walk was say 10 minutes or so? You head away from the station and towards the highway and it just passed the overpasses on the right. Turned out to be a lovely and relaxing location. The staff were very nice, the room was spacious and clean. Delicious food (primi portions are huge enough to split between two people) though it wasn't all from that farm so that was kind of weird. And best of all a very easy walk over to the temples and as mentioned a short walk to the train station. I will say the major downside was that there is like no staff on the property between the time lunch ends at 14:30 until they start preparing for dinner around 18:00. They also lock everything down during that time so that felt weird and if you needed anything you were SOL. I also could never get the WiFi to work.

We spent our Friday evening as an R&R day, just chilling at the hotel and enjoying naps and drinks. Saturday we were up not too early, 'checked our bags' (they just have you leave them in the common room and no one is really watching, so if the hotel is full of people and you have things of value it's totally at your own risk. though there wasn't anyplace to check them at the actual temple site either. shrugs) and headed to the temples around 11am. After having been so greatly disappointed by Pompeii, Paestum was a such a treat! I was just amazed by the size and condition of everything and it was just pretty cool to walk (limp) around the site. Sadly, you can't go into the temples themselves, but it was fun to just be there and imagine it being full of life. Not that I advocate this, but no one checked whether or not we had a ticket and I'm pretty sure that if you just really can't afford it that you could just walk right on in. We did purchase our dual ticket for the museum and the site (you can't purchase just the site) and the museum was OKAY. Nothing super spectacular but it was cool to see the stuff and then re-imagine it on the ruins.

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