Italy 2011

Wynette: After a few misses, we finally found the store to buy Italy SIM cards for our phones. When they took the back off of Charlie’s phone to put in the new card the very nice woman who was helping us smiled and said “Do you have a dog?” She found a bunch of our dog Chindi’s hairs inside the phone! So a part of Chindi is here with us. It reminded me of when my dog Bruno died and Deborah sent me a sweet sympathy card and told me that she, several years after we had been roommates, was still finding Bruno’s hairs among her belongings.

Here are our phone numbers while we are Italy:

Wynette 333-840-2985
Charlie 333-840-2728

See earlier post about contacting us that explains about calling to Italy. They said that if someone calls us here it will not incur any charges on our cell phones. Of course, you’ll be charged on your end depending on your phone plan. But don’t worry about it costing us anything.

I still can’t figure out how Chindi’s hairs got inside Charlie’s phone.

Total travel time, house to hotel room: 24 hours.
Step 1, nine hours, leave house, fly to Washington, DC. Didn’t sleep that well the night before so we are starting out tired.
Step 2, eight hours, fly to Rome. A typical tiring flight. We slept 2-3 hours. Now we are tired.
Step 3, seven hours, Rome to hotel in Sorrento. Take the Leonardo Express, not really that expressy, to the Rome train station, train to Naples. The fast, Eurostar train is 46 euro, the slower train is 22 euros, we take it, 2:15 vs 1:15 hours. Very nice ride, the Italian countryside is beautiful. It is spring and everything is green and flowering.

Rome and Naples train stations are huge and busy. We find the Circumvesuviana train and take it to Sorrento, only 3.3 euros. It is basically a city rail servicing the Bay of Naples, 34 stops in 20 miles to sorrento, the end of the line. We have our bags and are in everyone’s way but they are nice about it. Very crowded.
Eating lunch on the train to Naples:

We walk to our hotel, 15 minutes, got lost once but made it by 3 pm. We need to stay up until 8 pm. We go to dinner, very nice, grilled fish and Naples-style pizza, both excellent. We drop into bed at 8 and sleep 14.5 hours getting up at 10:30 am the next day.

We went to bed at 8 pm and got up at 10:30 am. We think we are recovered from jet lag. Out B&B (Magi House) outsources the second B to the ice cream place (Davide, generally thought to be the best in town) across the street. Here is us at B:

While we were there a tour group came by and everyone got an ice cream sample. We chatted with a guy from the group who said the tour stayed a week in one town in Tuscany and now a week in Sorrento. From each place they take day excursions. It seems like a good way to handle it, it is nice to stay in one place for a week. They each had earphones so she could talk to them all.
We went down to the Marina Grande to have lunch. We walked down this path:

and saw this little fruit market:

This is the Marina Grande and the deck by the water is where we had lunch:

We chose one Rick Steves liked. Here we are at lunch:

It was a nice little family place, run by Emily. After lunch she sat down and asked us what we had. It added up to 41 euro and, oops, they only took cash and we didn’t have enough. “No problem” she says, “you can pay next time you come.” They gave us a receipt from the bar and again said “No problem.” Depending on your level of cynicism, either down home friendliness or clever marketing.

And this is on the way back:

email: we will be checking email every day: wynrich@gmail.com and cpcrowley@gmail.com

phone: we plan to get Italian phone numbers for our T-mobile phones by buying an Italian SIM card. We will add the numbers here when we get them. Also you can call the hotel we are at. We will post the hotels and numbers as we know them. The previous post has our first hotel.

How to call Italy from the US: As an example, our first hotel’s number is: 011 39 081 807 11 21, where: 011: the international direct dial access code, 39: Italy’s country code, 081: the Sorrento area, and 8091121 is the local number. If you are using some other phone service, like a calling card, there might be a different way to get international access, once you do that the rest of the number (390818071121) will be the same.

Leading 0: Italian land-line area codes all begin with a ‘0’. You must include the 0 in the number for Italian numbers. This is not true for many other European countries. BUT Italian cell phone number area codes all begin with a ‘3’, do not dial a ‘0’ calling cell phones.

Skype: Skype has very cheap rates to Italy.

Leave Albuquerque March 30 at 8:40am.
Arrive Rome March 31 at 8 am. Take train to Naples and then Sorrento.

Stay at Magi House (web site), Dominova room

Via padre reginaldo giuliani, 56 – 80067 sorrento – italy
Phone: +39 081 807 11 21 (+39=Italy country code; 081=Sorrento area)
Staying 6 nights, leave on April 6.