After a week of the traffic and hordes of tourists, I was looking forward to a four-day rest on the Amafi Coast. Dan is completely a city person, and gets bored by scenic beauty – but that is a different story.

Our 65 year old landlady was right on time for checkout – she arrived with her husband on the back of a motor scooter. We had a three and a half our train ride to Naples before us – and much to our chagrin could only get reserved seats in a Second Class car. Our car was a little sleazy, but even after Dan realized en route that the First Class cars were empty (obviously a glitch in the reservation system), we didn’t feel like schlepping our stuff to a different car.

After we passed through Rome, I took a short nap, and Dan was gone when I woke up. Twenty minutes later, he was still gone. I thought he had gone to the dining car for coffee, but couldn’t imagine it taking this long. Then I noticed a long line of people in the aisle. The connecting door between train cars had broken – it was permanently shut – and Dan was trapped on the other side! After about an hour, I started to worry that his good humor might not be holding up. His book was on my side of the door, and I could only imagine him getting frustrated with the whole situation.

There were conductors on both sides of the door beating it with various tools – like the Three Stooges trying to fix a door. At last – success! I braced myself for Dan’s tirade, but he was grinning like a Cheshire cat! It seems he was the cause of this entire manifestation! After I fell asleep, a guy was sitting on the platform between the cars smoking a cigarette. The smoke was blowing into our car, and Dan got up and pointed at the "No Smoking" sign right over his head. The guys nodded and continued to smoke. So with a grand gesture, Dan slides the doors, and they slam shut. And don’t open again. All the people trying to bring ice cream treats back to their families on my side of the door were not amused. Dan kept trying to shush me – I was laughing pretty hard because while I had imagined him getting mad this entire time, he was pretty amused with himself. (ed note: I was innocently closing a train door. Who would have known that it would lock? I had to walk to the very back of the train to find a conductor who had a key. Then, the key didn’t work. There were probably ten people standing in that little space between the train cars. I had to go sit down because I jut wanted to laugh and laugh. The people I sat down with DID laugh! They really thought it was funny. I just didn’t want to get caught, or to become the center of wrath for those who were trying to bring back treats for their families. djp)

We got to the Naples train station at 2:30. I looked for the Avis desk – we had prepaid for a rental car through a travel agent in the US. We found the kiosk, but they closed at 1:00 on Sundays – which the travel agent neglected to tell us. Avis had another office across the street in a hotel, so I ran over there, but they were closed as well. We were running through our options – take a bus and forfeit the money we had paid for the car, spend a night in Naples and lose the cost of the hotel room we had also prepaid – when I decided to try to call the Avis office at the airport, figuring they would have later hours. The woman was very nice to me, and told me there was a city bus that ran from the train station to the airport.

Dan volunteered to wait at the train station while I took the bus. It was a pretty drive – the area around the train station is very sleazy, but Naples in on a bay, and you can see the modern city spread out at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. Happily, we got a very nice rental car – an Alpha Romeo. Unhappily, it was a standard transmission, which I do not regularly drive. However, I made it back to the train station. Dan had been having a great time watching all the strange characters that gather around a train station on a Sunday afternoon, but he was ready to go.

I drove, since I had gotten familiar with the freeways. It is a little surreal seeing modern highways with green exit signs for Pompeii. There is a modern city, but you think of Pompeii as the lost land of a fairy tale. Dan will write about our visit there.

We were fine as long as I was driving on the highway, but then we exited onto the mountain road that would take us to Ravello. We didn’t really know what to expect or where we were going – we had read about this hotel in the New York Times, and all we knew was it had a good view. We kept pointing straight up the mountain and joking about it being "up there." And sure enough, it was. But to get there, we had to drive about 15 miles of winding mountain roads. Under normal circumstances, I could barely manage to drive a standard car uphill. But Sunday afternoon on the Amalfi Coast is when all the tour busses head home. These roads are so narrow, two cars can barely pass. On the curves, only one bus can fit, so there were lots of times we would have to back up, or stop and wait while the bus tried to make the curve. Lots of teenagers on motor scooters would zoom by the stopped cars and weave in front of the buses. It took about an hour to get to Ravello, and I was worn out. We stopped in the town parking lot, and the attendant pointed at a three story flight of stairs and said the hotel was "up on the right." He said they would send someone for our luggage, so I went to check in.

Ravello is like Venice on a mountain. No cars, very narrow streets – but full of steps. I followed the signs to our hotel, and kept climbing. And climbing – twenty minutes up winding paths. When I got there, the receptionist told me I should have called from the parking lot – she would have sent a porter. I had no idea how they would get the bags up all those stairs. I had to go back down to tell Dan what was going on, and I was worried about getting me up all those stairs again. The porter showed up with a two wheeled dolly, and I was feeling sorry for him.

Our hotel, The Villa Cimbrone, is situated on a point at the tip of Ravello. While a villa has existed on this site for centuries, a nouveau riche European built the hotel at the turn of the century. The hotel's biggest claim to fame is that Greta Garbo stayed there in 1930 (I am not sure why they are so proud of this, but they have a plaque on the wall). The gardens are cool and green, and there is a terrace on the end of the point – The Terrace of Infinity – with a sweeping view over the coast.

I was taking photos from the window in our room, when I heard something that sounded like a lawn mower. It was the porter – pushing a contraption with treads and an industrial motor that he used to get up the steps. It was still a couple of flights to our room, and he was not a young man. But he hefted our large suitcases onto the back of his shoulders to carry them!

We didn’t do too much in Ravello except sit in the square. That is also the favorite pastime of Gore Vidal who retired there – because he feels like these mountains are where civilization began. Ravello is not actually on the water, and we drove down to Amalfi one day. It has an interesting Cathedral, very influenced by the Greek and North African cultures. It is also dedicated to St. Andrew – which is appropriate since he was a fisherman.

We ate at a family owned restaurant two nights in a row because the food was so good, and the people were so friendly. Our cute 17-year-old waiter spent a lot of time practicing his English with us, (How old do you have to be in the US to drive a car? What music is popular? Texas is very pretty.) (ed note: besides practicing his English, he was flirting with Doreen, who loved the idea of a cute Italian boy being taken with her. And I was sitting right there! djp) At one point we heard some music, and his father sent us outside to the end of the street. They were having a procession – a marching band, several priests and a statue of the Virgin (carried on the shoulders of four men). There were heading to the Cathedral for the annual service to give thanks for the rain.

Ravello was pretty and almost surreal. The towns along the Amalfi Coast are not that interesting – lots of stores selling touristy beach souvenirs. We did go to Pompeii and Paestum one day, but that is Dan’s story.

RETURN TO GRAND TOUR HOMEPAGE!