Paul & Libby’s World of Travel

Without a doubt, today was one of the biggest travel debacles that we’ve ever faced. The plan on disembarking from Jade was to go pick up a rental car and drive north to see some hill towns, amongst them a small principality called San Marino. However, if it always rains on us in Palermo, the Gods conspire to stop us when it comes to visiting San Marino (see July 2010). Today, it happened in the form of confusion around rental car dates with Avis. So, the agency in Civitavecchia didn’t have a car for us.

Now we faced a dilemma. We could return to the Rome airport and get a car there… this would waste 3-4 hours in terms of travel/transfer time and mean we’d only have time to spend the day driving to our hotel in Arezzo rather than sightseeing. Or, we could scrap the rental car idea (and San Marino) and just get a hotel in Rome.

Realistically, with the delayed start, I knew that the driving made far less sense, as we’d have two days with a lot of “car hours” for only a day or so of sightseeing. Just staying in Rome clearly made sense. Nonetheless, I was rather frustrated at the thought of having made plans that would now have to be undone and would ultimately be more of a hassle than had we just stayed in Rome from the start (as we’d originally considered).

Oh well. I’m nothing if not resourceful.

On my iPhone (thanks AT&T for the $60 data international data plan!), I found a good deal on Hotels.com for a five-star hotel on the Via Veneto called the Hotel Majestic, a few blocks from the Trevi Fountain and Spanish Steps. It wasn’t a Marriott or Starwoods property (I checked them first because I hate not getting points), but the price ($250/nt.), location, and reviews were very good.

As for getting to Rome, since we were already halfway to the train station in Civitavecchia, I saved the 150 euro cab fare and spent 25 for train tickets to Roma Termini. From there, we took a short taxi ride to the hotel. Aside from schlepping some heavy luggage, it was a relatively pain-free transfer.

In the end, the cost differential given a high car rental rate made the swap more-or-less a wash economically.

We spent the afternoon strolling around central Rome doing a variety of walks provided by Rick Steves’s guidebooks. We took in all of the famous sights: the Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain, Pantheon, and any number of greater and lesser churches. We had a good time…

For dinner, we ate at a sidewalk cafe near our hotel. Unfortunately, Emerson started to feel poorly and threw up after we returned to our hotel room. So, it seems that she was suffering from whatever I had the night before.

All in all, not the best of days…

We docked in Naples and headed off to catch a taxi for the train station in order to visit Pompeii. I’d debated the merits of the taxi/train pairing vs. just taking a taxi, but I didn’t like the first two taxi drivers we’d met (as they had little interest in our modest custom for a ride to the station). Indeed, that’s why we kept meeting other taxi drivers.

In contrast, Luigi agreed to take us to the station, seemed like a nice enough fellow, and offered us a deal (80 euro) on the private trip — 10 euros below the government rate. This would save time (at least an hour… maybe up to two) and only cost 30 euros or so more than the taxi/train option. So, Luigi become our driver for the morning, and we set off to a soundtrack of 70s slow jams.

We arrived at Pompeii a bit before 9am and agreed that we’d meet Luigi at 11:15. For a guy that’s always so-so on touring antiquity, I have to admit that the scale of Pompeii was impressive. It also required far less effort than other sites to imagine what ancient Pompeii looked like as it had been. That said, it was still sort of “meh” for me. Two things did strike me:

First, I was disappointed by the overall lack of graffiti. As a teenager, stories of Pompeii’s graffiti were one of the few time I wasn’t bored in Latin class. In hindsight, it seems my imagination overran the facts at Mr. Peet’s innuendos.

Second, without a doubt, I was struck by the casts of humans in the forms as they had perished. While crude forms of people, these objects carried so much humanity. You could almost sense their mental state of what had to be terror and panic or perhaps, in some cases, resignation. This was the only part of Pompeii that was truly “alive” to me.

We returned to Naples and explored a little of it on foot, as the ship docks right at the foot of the historic city center. We then found a restaurant and grabbed some pizza, which ironically wasn’t the best of our trip (though I blame the pizzeria, clearly not Napoli). Afterwards, I picked up some sfogliatella for everyone to enjoy back aboard the ship, which were crispier than I expected but not as beloved by me as the prior day’s cannoli.

After lunch, we returned to the ship to pack, while Emerson went to Splash Academy for the afternoon. At some point in the afternoon, I started to feel, well, bad… very lethargic. Packing was a struggle. By evening, I’d lost all of my appetite, and I developed a fever by the time I feel asleep (or passed out) around 8pm. I had a fitful night, but at some point my fever broke. By the next morning, I was more-or-less ok again, just a bit fatigued.