Monday, October 6 –

Our second night in Italy was blissfully free of car alarms, and we both got a great night’s sleep. Even better, I woke up to the news that the Patriots pulled off an upset win!

Buoyed by this, I had a nice run along the city streets. Noisy, no great photo ops, but I got to see the local folks rushing off to start their workweek.

Running by those cafes with the scent of coffee seeping out had its effect. I did my cool down sitting at a table at the café next to the hotel–two old guys pulling shots and steaming milk–no machine coffee this morning. Delightful!

Today’s agenda included a visit to the Naples Archaeological Museum. We had heard great things about it, and it lived up to the billing. It was busy, but not crazy, and it had some really excellent collections.

We kind of went for the Pompeii/Herculaneum artifacts, but there were a number of excellent pieces. I was really taken with the statues in the Farnese collection. They were huge, excavated from a 60-acre Roman bath complex!

There was also a rather…interesting…collection of items in “the secret room”. Guess it was considered “erotic art”, I thought it was more like male wishful thinking, but perhaps that’s just me. Sorry, I didn’t take any photos, you’ll have to visit yourself .

After the museum, we found a cute little place for a light lunch (though the salads were a bit more substantial than we anticipated). But they were delicious!

We collected our bags at the hotel and headed for the train station. We had uneventful rides (well, except for that part where we almost went to the wrong platform when we changed trains, but that’s another story…)

We got to our final destination but our hotel is in a small town a little farther out. We thought we’d get a cab, but the taxi stand was empty. No worries, we’ll take the bus. Except our tap & pay cards didn’t work. While we were attempting to fix that, the bus driver snarled at us to move to the back of the bus. OK bud, no skin off our nose if you don’t want us to pay.

Needless to say, he wasn’t keen on helping us get off at the right stop. No one on the bus understood English, but they did know our stop. So, while we hurtled up hills and around hairpin turns on a road maybe 6 feet wide, I’m furiously typing in Google translate in between lurches into the bus walls. Miraculously, a young man understood what we needed and directed us to get off at a stop only 150 meters from our hotel. Good people exist in any language. Chalk it up to another “travel adventure.”

Concurrently, we were communicating with our friends Gail and Jeff, who are going to be hiking with us and having their own transportation fun. We managed to connect back in the big town (this time using a cab the hotel called, we’d had enough of the bus) and had a delightful dinner together (sorry, got too involved talking, no food shots) We’re looking forward to hiking together over the next week. The terrain, while daunting on the roads, looks beautiful. Can’t wait to get started tomorrow!

25,459 steps

13.1 miles