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Amalfi Coast and Pompeii

Most people would not put Amalfi Coast and Pompei  together but I am not most people!  Honestly, both are absolutely worth the visit to see with your own eyes but also neither one is worthy of an actual individual post unless I was an amazing travel photographer.

Amalfi Coast was absolutely beautiful – it’s funny because there is really not much to say about it.  The drive is a bit scary because ... oh so often you are driving on an extremely narrow path at fairly high speeds.  All throughout the drive there are spots where you can stop and take pictures which we did a couple of times, and unfortunately the days we were there were a bit hazy.  It did not take away from the beauty but it does take away some of the amazing sun from the pictures.
Actually we drove through that tunnel




The only real story from Amalfi Coast visit is that we decided to trust our GPS and turned into some alley which was literally as wide (or as narrow depending on your life perspective) as our car; however, at one point we came to a complete stop when the GPS did not take into account that we were not going to make it past a pole and we had to back out literally inch by inch.  First I climbed out of the trunk (thank god for a minivan) to help guide Chris and it took us no less than 30 minutes to get ourselves through maybe 10 feet.  Fascinating experience that we do not want to repeat!

Pompeii was a couple of days later (after Rome).  It was magnificent in a different way – to see this place that I’ve read so much about and have seen paintings of was just interesting.  Of course when we went it was seemingly the hottest day EVER (ok, maybe not ever) but you have to understand that there is ZERO shade there.  Lots of guided tours offered while we waited in line to get the tickets, we skipped them because once we got inside the ruins, we overheard many tours and they mostly consisted of “John (or pick any other name) lived in this house with his family, Peter was his neighbor and then we have Jack.”  It seemed like there was not much to actually guide the visitors except for a little part with the display of dug out house stuff like vases, kitchen pots, etc.  The only really important story is that an ancient Roman city (with people and all their belongings) was buried in ash 25 meters deep in 79AD. In 1599, the first evidence that a city existed was found; however it was not until 1738 that any real excavation work began. 



The crowds
Unfortunately, a lot of "streets" in Pompeii looked like this
Anton had a blast in Pompeii jumping from one boulder to another

View from the top of the hill

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