Our Amalfi Coast Day

**This post on our visit to the Amalfi Coast should have appeared a few days ago, but I didn't get around to posting it until today. It was a bit of a disappointment so I think I didn't want to reflect on the details; recapping some of our more recent better events has been way more fun. :) Nevertheless it was still a really awesome experience to go from having seen something on tv (House Hunters International), arranging to go there, and then having everything become reality. Too cool! **

Our day trip to the Amalfi Coast started with a rush to the Naples train station (about a 20 min walk) to put our backpacks into storage for the day. We stopped by a small pastry shop for breakfast near the station and had the most wonderful cornetti (croissants filled with marmalade) and caffe lattes for breakfast. We headed back to the BNB and our driver was there awaiting to take us to the Amalfi port. We decided to go with a quasi-limo service because it was too difficult to make it to the port for 10am without spending a fortune on a different hotel. The cheapest place to stay in Amalfi for example was somewhere around $600 or Euros (I don't remember which) a night. Ha!

The drive was a little less eventful than many other people have made it out to be. Yes the roads were windy and yes the streets were very very narrow, but all in all it wasn't too nerve wracking at all. Our driver didn't speak much English, but he did point out the little towns we passed as we went by.

We arrived in Amafi about 1 hour early, so we explored the shops for a little while. We went to the meeting point about 15 minutes before our scheduled departure and they told us we'd be leaving about 10 minutes late. Long story short, this happened 3 more times and then once we finally did get going we had to stop back at the harbour to pick up another couple that was late...

The boat tour itself was a bit of a disappointment. I was anticipating that our guide would point things out as we went along and tell some stories, similar to all of the other cruises I've been on, but because of a language barrier/lack of enthusiasm, we only caught the names of the places. That being said, the scenery was still every bit as wonderful as we could have asked for, the weather was perfect: warm with a slight breeze, and we had some excellent company.

We stopped at the infamous Blue Grotto and paid an extra 5 Euro to go and have a row boat tour of the inside. This was pretty cool. It's a large cave inset from the coast, and is about the same size as a small house. Inside it's pitch black except for this blue-y green bright colour of the water. This happens because there's a tunnel underneath the surface of the cave walls that brings in sunlight from the outside. Quite an interesting natural phenomenon if you can call it that.

After the Blue Grotto, our next stop was the island of Capri. We were only supposed to stop for an hour for lunch according to the schedule, but it ended up being 3h45... We had some over-priced food and explored the shops, but again, it wasn't quite what we expected. The island is oriented towards people with a LOT of money, so it just wasn't really for us. Beautiful views though!

The ride home was a little more interesting in that we could see a HUGE rain storm approaching. Sure enough we spent the last half hour of the boat ride crammed into the hull of the boat trying to avoid getting drenched. We arrived back 1h45min late which meant that we had missed both possible buses to make our connection to the appropriate stations to make our overnight train connections... Both Lenny and I were not impressed. After telling our sob story to another cruise line operator, they helped us to stop the last ferry of the day, run to it, and then speedily make it through the town of Salerno for a train connection. We made it, but it was quite a stressful end to a fairly peaceful day in the sun.

The 10/11-hour journey from Salerno to Catania, Sicily by train was quite cramped, very cold, and did I mention cramped? Neither Lenny nor I got up once during the night simply because we'd have to crawl over two sleeping sick kids and an old sketchy Italian man. All in all though, we made it, it was cheap, and we would survive even if we did it again.