I was woken up to my parents calling me from NZ at 8am and I was actually thankful they did seeing as the closed shutters outside made it very dark inside. I spoke with them for an hour about their potential trip to visit us and the fact that they are keen to take a cruise ship around the coast line similar to what we have done. Anyone done this before and can give them some suggestions? Comment below. We have well and truly put them off driving so this was their other option. But honesty for those of you tossing up whether driving is for you the main thing I can't stress enough is just make sure your hotel/Airbnb etc always has parking. The other thing is just be aware that pretty much any city you go to you will have to pay for parking. Also be prepared to take tolls as the autoroutes are very helpful in getting you from one place to another fast. If you are ok with these three things then you shouldn't have many issues. The navigation is something you have to get used to no matter where you are driving if it is foreign to you, so expect some arguments and a lot of confusion...it does ease slightly. I got off the phone with the rents after an hour and had made my mind up that we would do Pompeii and Mt Vesuvius today since we hadn't researched anything to do in the Amalfi and I wanted to make the most of the one day we had. By the time we had packed the little snacks we did had left and got ready for the day it was about 10am. It was a surprisingly long drive to the Pompeii ruins taking us 40 minutes. Once again when we got there it was super busy and we got funnelled into some parking that we later discovered was €3 ($5 NZD) per hour. We really wished we had looked into cheaper parking or taken the train in from Sorrento as it probably would have been cheaper. We went to get in the queue which was reasonably long but moving fast, still we were annoyed we hadn't brought skip the line tickets last night...Haha what a surprise! But we had heard that at this time of year it isn't bad and you should be able to get into the ruins within a reasonable time frame. Anyways the lady in front of us initially left the line but came back to tell us that if we went back towards the direction of the carpark we could get skip the line tickets for only an extra €4 ($6.90). We thought this sounded great and picked a couple of those up before heading in past the line. Then they wouldn't let us in with Lew's large bag and we had to walk it back to the car only taking my backpack in. As we were walking back to the entrance from the car the severely dark clouds above us started opening up and the thunder and lightening made people run towards shelter screaming, had they never experienced this before? The temperature dropped and suddenly Lew and I wearing our shorts and a jacket weren't dressed well for the current weather! Never the less we entered the Pompeii ruins aware that we had only our single umbrella (yes Lew was yet again wishing he had brought his own one!) and we had to knock this off the list today as you weren't allowed to exit and come back in.

Most of the people already in there were huddling in a large entrance way which happened to be to a museum showing a video about the entire village. It was a fantastic way to wait out the rain and it was very busy seeing as there were a few people doing just that. Once the film had finished we had a better understanding if just how large the Pompeii ruins are and no wonder people tell you to take an entire day to do this. I have to admit since this was not the first time we were seeing ruins it was a little difficult to be excited by it. To be honest it actually reminded us of Oradour-sur-glane despite being many many years apart and missing a singer sewing machine in every room. The entire place had very well preserved main streets with the original large cobble stones with the scars of chariots and anything else with wheels that would have driven over them. For a bit of background history Pompeii was a Roman city near the Bay of Naples in Italy close by a volcano called Mount Vesuvius. In 79 AD Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompeii under thick blankets of volcanic ash. Two thousand people died and the city was forgotten about until its ruins were discovered in 1748 by a man called Carlo di Borbone. Surprisingly the city was mostly intact underneath all the volcanic dust and debris and the buildings, artefacts and skeletons left behind allowed us to learn a significant amount about life in the ancient Roman world. The place was so well preserved that later archaeologists even uncovered jars of preserved fruit and loaves of bread! Since we realised that the place was huge and it would take us days to see everything we began googling the best places to see and circled them on our map. To name a few there was the Terme Stabiane which were the public baths and had the remains of many intricately decorated motifs on the walls and the marble bath areas seperate for men and women. There was the House of Faun and the House of the Tragic Poet which were wealthy Romans and you could walk around the remains of their houses admiring the mostly intact mosaics covering the floors. Probably one of the most recommended places to visit is the Lupanare which is the brothel and the place has seperate small rooms with a stone bed in each of them. There are erotic motifs or basically porn that has been painted around the tops of the doorways which is how they discovered what the place was. It was a lot smaller than we thought it was going to be and we got squashed in there with a large tour group so we couldn't spend much time admiring these paintings.

The Garden of the Fugitives is another must visit as it has a large collection of plaster bodies you can observe. As excavators continued to discover human remains within the ruins they realised that the skeletons were surrounded by voids within the compacted ash. They decided to pour plaster of paris into the voids which allowed the outline of the persons final position, clothing and faces come to life. This was certainly the most impressive thing about visiting Pompeii and I remember years ago when I was younger reading about Pompeii in a book I owned and seeing an imagine of a dog that had been caught in the ash. I remember being so fascinated but also very sad for the poor dog and they had the exact plaster dog on display! Once we had finished looked at people in strange positions as if they had tried to hide in the fetal position to get away from the ash we moved on to view the Amphitheatre. It was similar to the ones we had seen in Nimes and the Colosseum in Rome but it was on a much much smaller scale. It was over grown with grass in parts so it was difficult to imagine how grand it might have been. It was 2pm at this stage and we sat down in the sun to have a snack before we continued to the next points of interest. We had to walk all the way out to the end of the road to view the Villa of Mysteries but it was huge and had numerous floor mosaics and painted walls still very much intact. That was the end of our circled items and it was 4pm at this stage. Lew said his favourite thing about the place was the fact that it is so well preserved considering its age and it also gave is the best view of how the Romans lived their lives. I personally thought it was pretty cool to see the plaster moulds of the people as well as the dog! Unfortunately parking cost us a whopping €15 ($25.80 NZD) which we weren't so happy about but just had to accept.

We put into Google maps the way to Mount Vesuvius as there was a 30 minute walk we could do up to the crater. There were so many switch back as we wound our way up the mountain surrounded by volcanic rocks and what looked like a recent fire which has wiped out the shrubbery. We went to put the car into parking and a local told us we could just drive straight to the top which we did instead. The temperature had dropped to a chilly 10 degrees and I knew our shorts were really not going to feel so good up here. The access to the walk had actually closed at 4pm so we were out of luck anyways and I was kinda glad as I was tired, hungry and also very cold which would not have been a good combination for the next hour if we were walking. We tried to find a supermarket on the way home and Lew wasn't keen at all to stop in Naples which meant we got stuck in some tiny town with no parking and not even a supermarket where it said there was one on the map. Where is New World and Countdown when you need them! Arriving back at the house at 7pm we both showered and walked up the road to a local restaurant called Zio Sams to pick up a couple of take away pizzas to accompany out left over pasta from last night. I told Lew a salad would accompany it better but that wasn't an option since we couldn't find that supermarket and we had to settle for a double carb dinner instead. Ciao everyone we will check out the famous Amalfi Coast tomorrow! xo