05-01 Sorrento - Our Kind of Town

The guy on duty at the front desk at the Hotel Rex called a cab for me and said it would cost about $10 to get to the Ferry Terminal and then proceeded to tell the cab driver to only charge me $10 for trip after he arrived. Awesome. Another reason this hotel was so great for us.

We arrived 30 minutes before departure and relaxed a bit before the boat was scheduled to leave and then we were wisked away to Sorrento - about 30 minutes away.

It's close to lunchtime when we arrive so we pick out a cafe with a view of the harbor and the Bay of Sorrento and Mt Vesuvius and have, uh, pizza! and lasagna. Rick's guide says the road up the hill to the town is "very steep". We take him at his word and pay the $1 for the shuttle to the top of the hill to the main plaza - $2 well spent; the road is very steep.

We roll our luggage down the street with us while shopping from store to store because the shuttle from the hotel doesn't come down until 3:30pm. We KNOW this and decided it would only be an hour or so that we would have to do this so we make do. Eventually I find some shade and a bench and send Karen off on her own to shop and explore while I watch people go by. She comes back with valuable information that she has located ANOTHER "Disney Store". While technically this is NOT a Disney Store it will have to do while we're in town.

We rendevouz with our shuttle and we drive 12 minutes uphill to our hotel, Il Nido, for the next 4 days. Check-in is painless, the manager is a very nice guy, and the 10 year old boy is operating the computer checking us in. We get in the elevator to go to our floor and we are stunned that we can't figure out which button of the four that are presented to us to push.

Our key says 117. We just checked in and stepped into the elevator. What floor are WE on? What floor are we supposed to go to?

This perplexing problem was mentioned in a Trip Advisor report and when I read it I said to myself, "How hard can it be to find you room?" Well, the adventure of finding our room was worth it for another amazing view. The city of Sorrento is just out of view to the right in the first shot. Mt Vesuvius is once again visible to the left of the huge tree.

Sorrento is above the neighbor's solar collector in this view.

We headed back into town on the shuttle at 5:20 and wandered around this nice little town. Most of the people seem to speak English. It seems that English speaking people have been making vacation homes here for a long time and the people have learned to cater to them.

We found a "Mom and Pop" place to eat dinner and I had some ham and gooey mozzarella sandwich that Karen liked better than hers so we traded.

We came out of the restaurant and heard a band playing down the street. It looked like a local arts fair was going on. At times this guy was singing English songs - since it was heavy metal I still couldn't understand what he was saying. Strangely, when he was singing Italian heavy metal I knew exactly what he was singing.

There was actually a store selling vinyl albums. I found this one and then I knew it was time to go back to the hotel. Seattle was getting a little too close to Sorrento. I'm still on vacation!