The Ryan Express Comes to Town

That evening, my friend Ryan calls us from the train station. He has been in Northern Italy and has come down to visit us for a few days. We tell him to just wait for us at the station and we will come meet him. It is about 10 at night. Getting to him proves to be much tougher than we thought. The train we would normally take is no longer running that route. So we try and take a bus. It ends up being the wrong bus and an hour later we are no closer to him than before. So we wait for another bus. By now the streets are teeming with crowds of young 20 somethings on a Friday night sizing each other up for an evening of fun. Buses are running pretty infrequently, so we finally hail a cab. We are literally crawling along in bumper-to-bumper traffic at midnight inching our way toward our stranded guest. By the time we pick him up and finally arrive back to the boat it is almost 2 am. Welcome to Naples Ryan. The next not too early morning, Ryan decides he wants to visit Pompei. Since we just spent the day at Herculean, Kip and I head to Sorrento for a day at the beach. We plan to meet back at the main train station at about 9 that night. It is the same train so we ride together as far as Pompei before splitting up.

Sorrento is a charming town crushed by tourists. Don’t these people know the travel season is over? Two big cruise ships are in the harbor and the streets are crowded with visitors mining through post cards and loot designed specially to lure them into parting with their cash. The beach, however, are all locals lying out soaking up the sun on their already deeply tanned glistening bodies. Each sand filled stretch is more beautiful than the last. The water dashing against the rocks is like liquid glass broken with each pulse of the Mediterranean. We spend the day reading, relaxing and feeling a part of this sand-loving community. In the late afternoon, when the sun lowers across the horizon and casts that golden light across the landscape, blankets are picked up and the backpacks are stuffed with books and half used sunscreen. We head back to Naples and meet up with Ryan at the main train station. He tells of his day adventures of walking around the ruins absorbed in the Roman life so long ago. We grab a bite to eat at an outside restaurant on one of the plazas before heading back to the boat.