First, yay for the internet. On Saturday we had no connection and so no post and now I am playing catch up.
I am a planning person. I like to have reservations. So yesterday when we headed out with no reservations I felt a little discomfitted. All went smoothly down to Messina and we got on the ferry and on our way through Calabria with no problems. Being a planning person, I did have a place in mind for us to stop. We got to Paola and the Hotel Blumentag around 2:45. Unfortunately there would be no one there until 4:30 so we continued on. But John was tired. Driving here is stressful.
We got off the main road a couple of times. No luck. We were on the coast road and it seems that most everything is closed this time of year. We stop at a 3 star hotel. Look at a room. Yuck! Four star is as low as I want to go. Finally we found a hotel residence club that was open all year. We got a room in a hastily constructed vacation villa – cardboard walls and the train outside. The train runs along the beach making the vista less than appealing.
We ate dinner at a pizza place at 6:30. The proprietor said to us, “You want to eat now!? We were there until 8 and only one other table got filled. I guess we were a little early.
On to Pompei tomorrow.