Southern Italy Tour Finale
We don’t have enough time to get to know our new digs in
Naples. Breakfast is served in the room
by Manuella. We hung a little list on
the door last night with a time and items and sure enough it shows up right on
time. A nice selections of cold stuff
and mostly fresh so it is OK. We check
in with Gabrielle before we leave and he is good with getting us a taxi at noon
for our 1:00 train out of town.
It is a nice morning for a walk along the harbor. We stroll past the restaurant where we had
pizza last night for another mile or so.
Once again there are thousands of people walking the waterfront this
morning. There are no couch potatoes in
Naples. It may have something to do with
the clear blue skies and high sixty temps but it is still impressive to us.
We get back to the B&B just before 12:00 and Gabrielle
is not there. We have a little trouble
making ourselves understood over the speaker system from the outside door to
the cleaning lady inside. Someone else
comes into the building and we pig–tail through the front door with them to get
to the apartments. Gabrielle shows up a
couple minutes later, calls a cab and all seems OK for our connections. The problem is that a tunnel is closed so
traffic is backed up and the cab takes another 15 minutes to get to us. Still OK.
When the cab arrives we sense a little timing problem with
our driver—he seems more worried than we are.
He drives like a madman (Neapolitan) for about ten minutes and then we
get stuck in a major traffic jam. At one
point he goes up on the sidewalk to pass two cars in front of us at a traffic
light but the first one doesn’t let him back in so we pass one stopped car for
the effort. Finally we get to the train
station at about 12:35 for out 1:00 train but we still need to get tickets.
We have prebooked tickets but we have to go to the ticket
counter to have them printed. We would
normally have printed them at one of the kiosks in the station but we think
because of the refugee crisis all on-line sales have to go through the
counter. When we look confused a fellow
tells us that we have to get a number from the ticket machine. It is #448 and they are currently serving
#405. We’re in trouble. Another older fellow comes over and tells us
that we can print from the machine, but then realizes that we can’t. He then takes our phone confirmation up to
one of the ticket guys (front of the line) who promptly prints out our tickets
in spite of the shouts of all the people waiting behind us. The guy then takes us to our train platform
and points us in the right direction.
John gives him 4 euros and the guy indicates that that is a pretty small
price to pay for the service so John digs a little deeper for all the coins in
his pocket and the fellow takes it, shrugs and walks away. He probably has to split with the guy who
printed the tickets. Gabrielle has told us that with the unemployment in Italy
now people have to invent new jobs and this is one of them.
The ride to Rome is pleasant through a valley east of the
mountains that lie between us and the west coast of Italy. We pull into Rome Termini right on schedule
and have about a half hour for the train to the airport. After some confusion by the terminal
personnel about which track we will use, we are in the right place when our
train pulls in and we’re off to the airport.
Our driver from our B&B is not there to meet us which is not
unexpected. We have been emailing him
and receiving form letters in return so we don’t really think there is 2-way
communication involved. John calls him
and he says he will be there in 15 minutes, and is.
The Villa Rosita is a little B&B in the town of
Fiumicino, the home of the Leonardo da Vinci Airport, Rome’s principle
international airport. Frederico, our
host, does a brisk little business with travelers who need a place close to the
airport but want to avoid the big hotels.
His fee base transfer service works well for the guests and very well
for Frederico. The villa itself is a
nice little oasis in the middle of a high traffic, highly commercial area near
the airport and the room is pleasant.
Frederico directs us to the little town square, really a
traffic circle, about a ten minute walk away for dinner. After our usual break we find the recommended
XXXXXXXXXXX for pizza and wine. We order
a couple appetizers and a tuna arugula pizza to split. They sell pizzas by the meter or half
meter. They’re all about a foot across
and then either 19” or 39” long. Our
server brings our wine, forgets our appetizers and then brings a pizza that we
couldn’t finish in two meals (we got the half meter). She got very busy and is very apologetic
about forgetting the aps but we are thankful she did. It would have been a waste of money and food. We probably should have just stayed at a
hotel for tonight but this is yet another new experience.
It is a brisk but clear and pretty night with a big moon on
our walk back to our place. We set an
alarm for a semi-early wake-up tomorrow morning.
What did we learn today?
When the odds are against them, individuals always can find a way to use
their ingenuity to figure out how to make a buck.
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