Rome to the Amalfi Coast

We had already planned last night to have a slow morning after the full on two days we just had knocking off our Rome "to do list". There was a potential plan to go visit the Appian Way and visit the Catacombs on the way out of town but it sounds as though this would be an all day thing and we had a 2.5 hour drive to our next Airbnb just outside of Sorrento still. The morning reminded me of Auckland, rain but still warm with humidity and we hid under the eaves of the wooden outdoor kitchen eating breakfast. The cats came to say hello rubbing themselves against our legs hoping for a bit of food. Nina had actually demolished a potato chip she had found on the ground last night, is that normal for a cat?! We threw everything into the car and said goodbye to our hosts - especially the cats. A fantastic place to stay especially if you have a car as it just stayed in their driveway the entire time. Once again we would have to use the autoroute since there was a difference of almost 3 hours between taking it and not. We left Rome with no issues and didn't come across a single roundabout! Most of the journey on the autoroute was uneventful until Lew thought we should probably get some petrol as the tank was nearing empty. We missed a petrol station on the side of the road and asked me to find out how long till the next one. We didn't think it would be far since whenever you arn't looking for petrol stations they seem to be every few hundred meters. However this wasn't the case and the next one was 50 kms away! Luckily at that stage the number of kms we had left in the tank was showing 80 so we were going to make it ok. It then started steadily dropping and now we only had 30km left in the tank with still 15 minutes until the petrol station. Another two minutes later it went down to 10kms and we still had about 20 kms left to drive. There was a slight panic in the car at this stage and we started turning off the aircon, headlights and anything else we could think of! We even dropped the speed from 120km/hr down to about 100 which would be more efficient for the car according to Lew. We knew we were really in trouble with the dashboard no longer showed us a number of kms left in the tank and the light started flashing at us. Another message came up on the dashboard in French which we couldn't read or perhaps didn't want to read as it clearly had the word failure on it. I have to admit I was crossing my fingers that if we did happen to run out of petrol completely it would be within the 1km left to the petrol station mark so we could push it in there! We counted down the km to go as the French failure sign started coming up more frequently and finally there was a sign indicating this petrol station we were looking for. We were so thankful as we turned off into the service area and promised ourselves we would never do that again. Lew was rather pleased that we had managed to get 670km to the one tank but no so pleased when we saw it cost us €72 ($121 NZD) to fill it up completely! The petrol station was joined to a auto grill where you can get food and since it was 1pm we decided to get lunch here as well killing two birds with one stone. We were very confused about how there system worked as Lew tried to point to a slice of pizza he wanted but the women told him he needed a ticket. I had found some chicken dish that looked as though it didn't have any cheese in and whilst Lew brought the pizza before picking it up. Both of our meals cost about €7.50 ($12.60) which was such a rip off but tasted pretty good. Continuing on the road Naples came into view and our original plan was to visit but we had been told a lot about how unsafe parts of it is and since we had all our gear in the car we thought it wouldn't be wise. From the autostrada it also didn't look like a place we wanted to go to with tonnes of old buildings that looked very run down. Passing over Naples we started to wind down around the coast looking back on the port town. There were dark black clouds sitting above it and it looked like we going to get some rain soon. The roads started getting windy and we went through a massive tunnel taking us out to the Amalfi peninsula. It wasn't long after we exited the tunnel that Sorrento came into view with beautiful houses nestled in the valley. Our accomodation was outside of Sorrento as it had parking and we wanted to explore Pompeii and also Amalfi/Atrani/Positano on the other side so it provided a pretty good base. We took some side roads to get to the place and they honestly looked like one way roads yet people still came at us from the other direction and you had to squeeze past each other. Finding the place wasn't too hard as our hosts has left the gate open for us to drive straight in. They showed us the place which was rather large and could cater for a lot more people than just two as it had a full kitchen as well as two bedrooms. Unloading everything we snooped around the place looking for anything interesting and only finding a strange back room with windows that contained what I was actually looking for, a clothes rack :). Throwing some washing on we thought we would go find a supermarket to get snacks and food to cook dinner. Our hosts said all of the supermarkets would be closed around where we were since it was a Sunday so we had to go into Sorrento to find one which was only about 20 minutes drive anyways. We drove the tiny streets again down the mountain into the township and the first market we came across was closed. The next one however we discovered was in the ZTL zone and we had to find a park on the road to walked to it. Even on a Sunday they made you pay for parking and after putting €1 ($1.70 NZD) into the machine giving us only 30 minutes we found a ticket tucked into the machine for an hour and used that instead, bonus! Shame we hadn't noticed it at first.

The supermarket was open but there were lots of people milling about in the streets below and since we had extra time we went to check it out. There were quite a few lanes of shops mostly aimed at what tourist love hence they were probably tourist traps. There were multiple lemon shops selling the favoured limoncello which we had tried in Indonesia and hated it, just to make sure they Indonesia's were making the same stuff as the the Italians I tried one of the free limoncello lollies a shop was offering. Sure enough it was incredibly strong and absolutely awful blend of liquor and lemon. Safe to say we wern't missing out on anything. The main street of the town already had their large xmas wreaths up which we though was a tad early but had noticed a few shops were starting to sell xmas decorations in the towns we had passes through also. Our most favourite place we came across was actually called Puro which sold gelato and initially we were just going to get a couple of cups as usual but Lew discovered that it's actually cheaper to buy it in bulk. So for €4.90 ($8.25 NZD) we were able to get 250g of lemon and strawberry gelato which was going to be our treat for after dinner. The time on our parking ticket was running out and we headed into the grocery store which was actually a lot smaller than we realised and brought ingredients to make a pasta for dinner. We got fresh olives and also some pasta which Lew choose and it happened to be really large cylinders made somewhere in the Sorrento region so we figured we had to try it. Whilst we were inside it started pouring down and those black clouds did finally hit us, I have to admit I was looking forward to some rain so we could snuggle in. It is a shame though that the wifi in our Airbnb is rubbish so we can't watch a movie . Thankfully it was only spitting by the time we were leaving and we were able to get to the car without getting drenched. For some strange reason because of where we were in town Google Maps took us all the way out of town a different way and made us wind our way around the back roads to our accomodation taking us 40 minutes instead of the 10 it took to get down there. It was pretty frustrating since it was getting dark and there was a lot of dodging cars on tight roads that weren't impressing us. Arriving back at the house we turned the heating up to 29 degrees since the place was freezing and set about making our yummy pasta. It was certainly delicious but probably not as good as an Italian making it for us if we had gone out for dinner. We finished dinner off with gelato and the shop had included some mini cones and wafers for us as well so it was certainly a treat. We were unsure of our plans for tomorrow it was either going to be a visit to the Pompeii ruins and Mount Vesuvius or checking out the Amalfi coast. Weather dependent! Apoligies there wasnt many photos to go with this one!