Day Eight: Sorrento, Italy

We checked out of the Navy Lodge this morning, but they let us store our luggage there until we returned from Sorrento in the afternoon.

We walked to a bus stop near the base gym to board the ITT travel agency bus to Sorrento.  Behind us on the bus was a lady from Fort Smith, Arkansas, who was there visiting her daughter.  Her daughter was married to a teacher at the high school on base.

It was a beautiful and interesting drive to Sorrento, although there was lots of traffic part of the way.  Drivers weave in and out on the roads, with little regard for the lines on the road, the no-passing markings, or other traffic!  Motorcyclists are everywhere, and drive between the lines of traffic whenever they want.  Throw in a few bicyclists, big trucks and crazy drivers, and you can imagine how wild this gets!  We saw much the same crazy traffic during the three years we lived in Spain in the 1970s, and during about a dozen other military Space-Available trips to European countries during the 1980s and 1990s.  It is often like playing bumper cars!  Bob wanted to rent a car during this trip, as we have done elsewhere in Europe in the past, but I was not anxious to do that.  Besides the traffic, it was very difficult to find our way around in the cities.  Many of the military people we saw driving used GPS systems.  The streets are not well marked, and they often change names as you go along.  We have a GPS, but only for the U.S.  We will look into adding European city streets to our GPS device.  By the way, gas in Italy goes for about $7 per gallon.  So it's much cheaper, safer and more relaxing to take a bus, train or shuttle!

Anyway, back to our trip to Sorrento.  The bus stopped at one scenic point to let everyone take photos.  See below:

Coastline along road to Sorrento, Italy

Coastline on the way to Sorrento, Italy

The bus let us off in Sorrento for about 3 hours of shopping, sightseeing and lunch.  There were all kinds of shops, including one that sold sandals, made to order, right in the store as you waited.  Here's a photo of their sandals:



Display at sandal store, Sorrento, Italy



Other stores sold ceramics, lemon products (Sorrento is known for its lemons), inlaid wood, hand-embroidered table cloths and clothes.  There were lots and lots of tourists here, from England, Germany and the U.S. 

We had a light lunch, then boarded the shuttle for the ride back to the base.  We bought sub sandwiches for dinner, from the Subway shop on the base, then walked off base to the Millennium Hotel ($130).

We had to decide whether to stay longer in Italy, whether to stay where we were or go elsewhere in Italy or Europe, or return home.  We decided to try to return home, because we were getting worn out, most of the base hotels were full meaning our hotel costs were getting expensive, and because there were two flights scheduled to leave from the Navy base in Naples tomorrow for Spain so it looked like a good bet that we could start heading back towards home.

In tomorrow's post, I will tell about some more interesting people we met, and about our ride back to Spain.