Blogs from Sorrento, Campania, Italy, Europe - page 17

Day Trips from Sorrento Pompeii, Positano It's been a beautiful but sometimes difficult week in Sorrento. The weather has been unkind to us at times and the rain seems to have overheard our daily 'where to' conversation and arrived five minutes before us. We haven't let this dampen our spirits (pardon the pun) but it has meant that from time to time we had to imagine the postcard view instead of experiencing it first hand. Sorrento is a beautiful and very noisy town. The atmosphere is great and the people very friendly. We discovered early in the week a beautiful cafe nestled in a cobblestoned alley way and this became our favourite haunt, not only because it had wifi internet access but because the family who owned it were absolutely lovely! They treated the girls like ... read more

written throughout the day... I am on the train heading for Sorrento, Italy. I am traveling past miles and miles of Italian countryside with grapevines as far as I can see. I am heading for Naples, switching trains, and then to Pompeii first. Its getting a little overcast today, maybe even a few sprinkles. No rain though! Naples is where pizza was created, with two main choices, margarita, or marinara. I am now sitting in the ruins of Pompeii. In 79 A.D., Mt. Vesuvius erupted and covered the city with ash and earth, preserving the town to be discovered centuries later. This place is huge, and eerie. Buildings, paintings, pots, tools, and even bodies of people and a dog are here. One body was captured for eternity in a praying position while the ash and earth ... read more

As our bus to Rome is not until late this afternoon, we got a slow start to today and didn't get up until the Sunday church bells started ringing. Evy and I took a final walk though the little streets, stopping at the small stores selling ceramics or lace and bought a few postcards. After lunch back at the apartment, we tidied up and waiting to just before 4 before carrying our stuff down to entrance. At the reception, they informed us a taxi would charge 20 Euro for the short (5 minute ride) to the train station, so we opted to try for the public bus instead. Unfortunately, the bus never came and we ended up wheeling our luggage the 20 minutes to the train station, arriving a full 40 minutes early. Our bus was ... read more

With our time in Florence finished we grabbed a train to the southern coast of Italy, to the Amalfi Coast. The first stop was Naples and we toyed with the idea of spending the day there and seeing the sights, but dragging our luggage around quickly put that idea on the back burner. It turned out to be a good idea too, because it was quite a journey to get ourselves to the small town of Sorrento which would be our home for the next 3 days. From Naples we jumped a local train which rattled it's way around the Bay of Naples and through the shadow of the infamous Mount Vesuvius. We arrived in Sorrento which is the end of the line for the train and walked the short distance into town. We quickly found ... read more

Our week on the Amalfi coast has been one of the top weeks of the trip. Definately what we needed after the troubles in Milan and the hectic life in Rome. It's not necessarily cheap so we camped the entire time. The first stop was a little village called Minori. We hiked up into the hills and camped at a lemon grove at the top of the hill. This was a significant hill mind you with over a thousand steps to get to the top (more than we climbed on the Eiffel Tower). There was a road that took you about half the way but the actual farm was only accessible by these steps. The lemon farmers there were pretty low key and let us do our own thing. The facilities included everything we needed for ... read more