It’s our last vacation. Not like ever. But our last one while living in the UK. We shipped off our worldly belongings, made sure the pups got safely to Texas then hopped one more flight to Italy! I had Pompeii on my for all three years we’ve lived here and by the skin of our teeth we’re going to get it in!
We arrived in Naples and found our way through lots of back
paths and beautiful floral lined passages to our hotel for the week.
What a view we had! We had booked the hotel online and it
failed to mention that it completely overlooked the Gulf of Naples and out to
the mountains in the distance. Someone really needs to work with their marketing
department.
We booked a tour as we would not have a car with us and the
thought of renting one and driving on the Amalfi Coast scared me and the
thought of jumping in a taxi with an Italian driver to take me also was a hard
pass. So we found a Rick Steve approved tour service which even picked us up at
our hotel – SCORE!
Pompeii was just as fascinating and beautiful as I had hoped. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79AD, it ended the city while preserving it in a strange frozen in time snapshot view of Roman life. The eruption of Vesuvius lasted for two days. At first, it was mostly a rain of stone & soot lasting about 18 hours, allowing most inhabitants to escape. It’s thought that most residents were able to escape and probably even managed to salvage some of their most valuable belongings. At some time in the night or early the next day, pyroclastic flows began near the volcano, consisting of high speed, dense, and very hot ash clouds, knocking down wholly or partly all structures in their path, incinerating or suffocating the remaining population and altering the landscape, including the coastline. By evening of the second day, the eruption was over, leaving only haze in the atmosphere through which the sun shone weakly. Much of what this did was seal in whatever was happening at the moment of the eruption so minus some decay for a couple of centuries, when the excavators started digging in the 19th/20th centuries they got a true view of Roman life.
Next stop on our tour was Vesuvius itself.
Our tour guide assured us on the way over that we had
nothing to worry about while climbing a still active volcano as he knew “how to
say ‘RUN!’ in 27 different languages”. I asked him to go ahead and use English
first if he felt the need to shout it.
We have climbed up & down a lot of things in our three years in the UK. Just a mental note for next time. Volcanos are steep!
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