We woke up Wednesday to a beautiful sunny day, so we headed out to the Amalfi Coast. The famous drive stretches between Sorrento and Solerno along the southern coast of the Sorrentine Peninsula. To picture the drive, imagine taking the Big Sur drive along Highway 1 in California. Now take away 1 of the lanes and add tour buses and Italian drivers. Add a few picturesque villages built into the hillside and you have the Amalfi Coast. Our rented Smart Car was essentially an enclosed diesel-powered go-cart, which turned out to be just about perfect for the drive (perfect would have been an Italian sports car!). Our first stop of the day was at a village called Positano. Literally built into the side of a steep hill, the town has only 1 street open to cars and the only way to get around is a labyrinth of stairs. We parked at the top and walked all the way down to the beach, which took about 20 minutes. At the bottom, we took guesses of how many stairs it would be to the top (my guess was 823). After chugging back to the car, we had counted 827 steps. Too bad I’m not the betting type!
The next stop was the town of Amalfi, where we wandered around and took more pictures. From there we drove up the mountainside to a town called Ravello, which is perched on a cliff 1000 feet above the water. We ate at a wonderful restaurant with a breathtaking view of the coastline (Thanks Rick Steves for the recommendation!). After some very gooey gelato, we headed back to the main road and continued toward Solerno. Our next stop was the Greek ruins of Paestum which are about 20 miles South of Solerno. We accidentally got on to the wrong direction of the autostrada, but we eventually figured it out and got to pay the toll twice! We made it down to Paestum and spent about an hour exploring the ruins. To be quite honest, by this point we were pretty tired of walking around ruins. We decided it might be more fun to make up our own stories about the ruins (i.e. the Temple of Zeus was really used to host youth basketball games and community fundraisers).
From Paestum, we headed back to Sorrento on the autostrada. We again got a little turned around and accidentally ended up back at Pompeii. I should mention that our faithful GPS “Gerdy” had given in to the trauma of global air travel and arrived in Italy without a functioning screen. We will miss you Gerdy!
At some point on the drive home, Christina developed a severe migraine and was virtually incapacitated by the time we got home. She went to bed early and I had a dinner of salami and crackers (it was a lot better than it sounds!).
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