naples, italy

a colusseum in pompeii

there were wild poppies everywhere in italy! they were beautiful but people in italy treated them like weeds


a beautiful view in sorrento

while we were docked in naples we met a neat couple from canada who were on a different cruise ship. we ended up spending our entire day with travis and lani {sorry if the spelling's bad!} which made for a great time. we first went and saw the ruins at pompeii. they were huge! there were different sections of the city during each ruling period, so it was interesting to see the different styles and layouts of the houses.

many of the houses had an interesting draining system inside the house that would collect and drain rain water for house use.

chris's favorite part about pompeii were the encased humans {morbid i know!}.

i can't even imagine being buried alive by ash and lime stone much less being in the vicinity of a volcano eruption. after pompeii we hopped back on the train and headed to the little town of sorrento. it was a very pretty place with lots of beautiful flowers and greenery every where and the buildings were all very colorful too.

we ate lunch at this restaurant and enjoyed the patio dining you find all over europe. sorrento is famous for its pizza so i tried the traditional margerita pizza {tomato, cheese and basil} and chris had pepperoni, although the pepperoni is not what we're used to in the states. at lunch we sat next to another couple that had come over for their honeymoon and were spending 200 euro a night for the hotel they were in {yikes! that's like 300 dollars a night!}. after lunch we walked around sorrento for awhile and then hopped on the train to head back to pompeii. we wanted to climb mt. vesuvius {the volcano responsible for burying pompeii}. it was really cloudy and kinda rainy and we couldn't really even see the mountain because it was covered in clouds. but after talking to both the tour bus company that takes people to the top and a bunch of taxi drivers, we determined that we would be able to get to the top of the mountain and so us and the other couple shared a 70 euro taxi ride up to the top where the hike starts {the taxi driver was gonna wait for us and then take us back to the train station afterward}. the drive up the mountain was beautiful but the higher up we got the foggier and foggier it became. the road was super narrow and huge tour buses often came flying around the corner. pretty soon we couldn't even see 3 feet in front of us. i was totally freaking out. when we finally got to the top it was rainy and foggy and there were people everywhere. we saw that the gate to the trail was locked. after talking to the owners of the gift shop and keepers of the gate, we discovered that in fact we couldn't get up to the top of mt. vesuvius. we were furious. we couldn't believe that they would tell us the mountain was open when in fact it wasn't. stupid scam artists. we wanted the taxi man to take us back to naples where the boats were for 50-60 euros since he didn't have to wait and we were up there for like .2 seconds. so after some arguing between us who don't speak italian and the taxi driver who doesn't speak english, taxi man decides to give us "special price" and take us to naples for the same 70 euros. by this time we were exasperated and agreed. stupid scam artists.