Monday, May 5 - Sorrento

6:30 a.m. hike to the train station. Not a fun way to wake up in the morning. With so many people smoking and all the exhaust fumes from the scooters, I truly felt like I had diminished lung capacity, huffing and puffing away. Then much to my annoyance I realized when we got on the train that that the step counter had not worked right. It had only counted 37 steps, when we had easily walked a mile. We went to Naples from Rome on a fast Eurostar train. It was a nice train. At Naples we had a man pick up up in a Mercedes to take us to Sorrento. He was cracking us up because at the end of EVERY sentence he would say, "You know?" We checked in at the Bellevue Syrene and I think that was the prettiest hotel yet. http://www.bellevue.it/eng/ We sampled the Lemoncello for which Sorrento is famous, but it was terrible. It is so strong, almost 45% alcohol I think. Nasty stuff, like furniture polish. We decided to spend our afternoon exploring Pompeii. We were both disappointed with it and it felt like a time suck. At first it was fun but after 30 minutes, it all looked the same. What I mainly wanted to see was the preserved victims but it turns out they are not there anymore. They are on display in a museum in Naples. All they had were three plaster casts of some of the victims. The place was huge and we stayed there four hours trying to make sure we weren't missing something but no, that was all there was. I'm still glad we saw it, just expected more somehow. When we got back to Sorrento, we took baths because we were so dusty and grubby after Pompeii. I had fallen twice in there. Once I had stepped in a hole and turned my right ankle and then later my left calf knotted up on me and I fell down a little gravel slope. Ended up with a blood blister on my hand from that one and beat my new camera all to heck. It felt good to get cleaned up and dressed nice. We went to this really nice restaurant (Caruso, San Antonino 12, off Piazza Tasso), with complimentary champagne when they seat you and complimentary wine with dessert. They had a guy playing guitar and going from table to table taking requests. When he came to us, he looked at me and said, "Any requests? Are you from Russia?" Apparently I look Russian. I told Troy I was changing my name to Oksana. Our food there was very good. After supper we went back to the hotel and sat on the balcony in our bathrobes and drank some more. I felt bad that we couldn't finish the bottle. It had been an anniversary gift from the hotel. It was a shame to waste it but it was making me sleepy. It was time to call it a day. It was our peak mileage day.

24460 steps walked
9.916 miles
1161 calories burned
3:28 hrs walked

**Funny thing on the train to Pompeii from Sorrento. It was a very confusing ticket to read and the person who sold it couldn't speak English very well. After we got on, we were really questioning if we were on teh right train. So we asked this official looking man if we had the right train. He looks at it for a while and he's saying something in Italian, apparently talking to himself. He goes and gets the other man who was in a suit and I thought that was his boss. They studied it for a long time and they kept telling us, "No refund, no refund." So Troy keeps saying, "Where do we get off?" He must have asked that three or four times. Finally these guys come to the conclusion that we were okay where we were. It turned out they weren't even train employees! Well, one of them may have been a security guard but the other one was just a passenger. We could not stop laughing at that