Post SAS – Part I - Italy - Finally!

After 105 days on Semester at Sea, we said good-bye to our shipboard home and friends in Southampton, England.  It was difficult to say goodbye to all our friends and our special home aboard the World Explorer.  It was time to go back to reality...but not quite yet.  We decided to take another month and spend some time in Europe, visiting places we had never been before.

We had the very good fortune of meeting many people on the ship during our 105 days at sea. The Mayes family, Rick and Jennifer, and their three kids, Tim, Ben and Allie became good friends. We first met them on a field trip at our initial stop in Hawaii and enjoyed spending time with them both on and off the ship for the rest of the voyage. Their boys and ours are about the same age and their daughter Allie was a ship favorite. Christy, Luke and I (and Milton) attended Rick’s class on Comparative Politics once we discovered it after South Africa. It wasn’t a course he teaches at his home institution but he was an excellent lecturer and it was a great class. 

The shocking part about being in Europe was that everyone looked like us.  After our time in Asia and Africa, we were used to being the minority and being able to find each other easily in a crowd.  Now, everywhere we looked we saw people who looked familiar and who often spoke English.  We have talked before about the difference between vacation and travel.  Now we need to split it into three categories – vacationing, simply taking a break from life on the beach; touring, trying to visit all the main sites and; traveling, experiencing destinations in a more intimate way, likely in places not geared towards easy exploration.  Europe for us was a transition from being travelers to being tourists.  One of our family philosophies is that there is little growth in comfort and little comfort in growth.  Semester at Sea was definitely more in the growth zone and our travel through Europe was a move towards the comfort zone. 

In Rome we rented the first of many apartments through AirBNB.  It was so comforting to be in a home and have a kitchen, laundry, multiple bedrooms –and space!  We took advantage of our big deck to have appetizers and wine with the Mayes Family and we made dinner at home one night.  After not cooking for 3 months, it did not all go as planned, but none-the-less, it was great to eat a dinner at home. 

The Mayes were awesome travel companions as we walked everywhere around Rome for three days.  We ate more pizza than should be legal, drank a lot of espresso, and hit all of the main historical sites in Rome.   Highlights were, of course, the Coliseum, the old Forum, the Trivi Fountain and the Pantheon.  We put miles on our feet and even had to make a repeat visit to the Pantheon to check it out again! 

On our last day with the Mayes before they headed off to Barcelona and we went south to Sorrento, we walked (of course) over to the Vatican to finish up our tour of the big sites.  With Allie in tow, the Vatican was going to be daunting for the Mayes, so we adopted Ben for the day and he joined us as our tour was herded through the Vatican.  The two biggest surprises were the sheer size of the St Peter’s Basilica and whole Vatican City and the small size of the Sistine Chapel.  Somehow we expected the Sistine Chapel to be large, considering it houses Michelangelo’s masterpiece ceiling and all the Cardinals when they meet to select a new Pope.  In reality it was a fairly small room, especially compared to the size of many other parts of the City. We loved the map rooms with their historical perspective of new lands and the detail in the buildings around the Vatican, especially the sheer scale and ornateness of St Peter’s.

During our time in Rome, we tried to figure out what the heck we were going to do next.  We were certain that we wanted to make it to Croatia at some point but beyond that we really didn’t know what we wanted to do or where we wanted to go.  So we started to use the weather forecast as our compass and set our course to where the weather was reasonable. Turns out weather.com indicated the next stop should be Sorrento, as the weather to the North (Croatia, Austria, Czech Republic) was pretty wretched. 

We cobbled together a quick trip to Sorrento and the Amalfi Coast, finding a place to stay on AirBNB and figuring that we would play it by ear once our train got us there.  Along the way, we made a pit stop in Pompeii because we had all learned about it in school and were reminded of it by the hit song in 2013.  The Italians have excavated most of an entire city that was buried under fifteen feet of ash and pumice from Mount Vesuvius’ massive eruption in 79AD.  It was stunning how large and well preserved the city was considering it was buried almost two millennia ago. 

The Amalfi Coast is all about the pretty little coastal towns that stretch down the seaside.  Our AirBNB host was also a travel agent and arranged a driver to take us down the coast.  We were happy to have a driver who was familiar with the road as it is a tiny little coastal road, clearly not designed for the large, 48-passenger tour buses that regularly crowd the road.  Although we weren’t exactly in the prime season for Amalfi or travel in Europe, this was our first indication that there is no such thing as “off-season” in Europe.  We were amazed at the massive number of tourists crowding all of the places we visited – it seems every square and restaurant was busy.  We can only imagine what July and August must look like when the area is much busier, according to the locals.  Despite our 100 days at sea, we still appreciated all of the ocean vistas that appeared along the coast. 

Sorrento was an interesting town, with a newer part up on the hill and a spectacular old town down by the shore and the harbor.  We had several good meals there and took in our share of delicious Italian wine.  And we continued our quest to try as many ice cream places as we could find.  We could have spent more time exploring old Sorrento but it was time to move so we consulted the weather compass and figured our next move should be North to Venice.  Despite a middling weather forecast, we figured that Venice was a quick hop over to Slovenia and from there to Croatia.  We were learning that, while there are lots of low cost airlines in Europe, some places are actually pretty hard to get to. 

Venice was our last stop in Italy and we lucked into another great place on AirBNB.  When you look at a map of Venice, in the northwest corner there is a little green spot that looks like a park.  Turns out that green spot if is a tennis court and the place we booked is owned by the family that owns the little compound there, including the court, two rentals and their house. 

We learned a ton about Venice in our short rainy stay there.  The crazy narrow little streets, interspersed with canals and arched bridges (409 of them connecting 117 islands) were enchanting.  It was surprising to learn of the dominance of Venice in world commerce from the mid-15^th century onwards.  But when we saw the spectacular cathedrals and the Doge’s Palace it seemed to prove the claims.  We were planning to do the trademark tourist activity in Venice but the fairly constant rain meant we were unable to get in a gondola ride around the canals.   The bonus of having a few rainy days was it allowed us to plan out the next few weeks.   That’s a story for our next post though.