7/4: Happy American Bastille Day!

Happy Fourth! It’s already my (Mike’s) third turn writing a blog entry because it’s our eleventh day of the trip. This also means that yesterday morning marked Simone’s and my personal record for trip length. (It’s cool, though — there was this one time the world shut down for months, and the five of us didn’t see anyone else we knew in person for at least nine weeks.)

We’re traveling with the Jags still! We all woke up in Rome, trained to Naples, made three stops in Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii, and a winery en route to Sorrento in the Amalfi Coast.

Mount Vesuvius: this is the volcano that erupts every 1,200 years on average and buried Pompeii and Herculean in the first century AD while tragically freezing the unsuspecting populations in lava carbonite. We hiked up the top in order to view into the crater and as well as the northern part of the Amalfi Coast and Capri. In the first picture, Capri is the island to the west (right), and then the land to the left (east) is the northern side of the Amalfi peninsula. Luke is pointing at the western most town on this northern face because it’s Sorrento. I’m not sure how well this comes out, though. In the second picture, you can see steam coming out of the volcano!

Pompeii: When this area was settled, the people had no reason to question why they found the volcano ashed soil so well suited for crops and building. In modern times, seventeen years of earthquakes would’ve provided suitable warning, but they had no idea two thousand years ago that earthquakes can precede volcanic eruptions if you settled on a free standing mountain with soil conveniently suited for crops and building. We saw people and animals frozen in horror and in time inside a small museum. In the third picture, you might get a sense of the beautiful ruins we walked though.

Bosco De ‘Medici: We went to a beautiful winery nearby for lunch and some wine. We toured the grounds quickly, patting some horses and getting an explanation that when ruins were found in between the train station and winery that there would be no further excavation in the direction of the train station while the winery expected to concede some land in the coming years because of a recent year discovery. Please see the fourth picture below to see ten people just hanging out at lunch.

Sorrento: We got in just before 7p, and Luke and I ducked off to slip into a residents’ beach and grab a quick swim in Mediterranean waters! Italy’s been 90-100 degrees F since we arrived, so you can imagine how refreshing this was. But, I didn’t take any pictures. Around 8p, I took this fifth picture on our trek back uphill to our hotel because it was a cool gorge. I sorta thought we’d see it again during the daytime, but we never went back that way. Anyway, Simone gets to write about the Amalfi Coast in her post tomorrow . . .