Arrival & first impressions

We've made it, though I'm already wondering if I'll manage to write anything comprehensible on this ancient keyboard. It certainly isn't suitable for touch-typing & the layout is quite different to the British one. I'll persevere. Hopefully it will get easier with practice.

We are just about recovering from a traumatic arrival in Italy. We landed at Naples airport, which is more like an old hangar than a modern airport. We could see no sign of the car hire desks to collect our prebooked car. There was nobody at the info desk. We eventually asked a Thomson rep - we thought she might at least speak English. She suggested we tried the other terminal. We did our best to find it but found ourselves outside. The taxi drivers did directed us to where the car hire car park was. Off we set. A long way it seemed to be. The Fox took the cases & I pushed myself. It felt like I'd done a marathon by the time we got there after crossing roads, going up & down drop kerbs(?). There we found the office closed. We had to go back to the terminals! We discovered there was a courtesy bus to the airport but it was not accessible for me. We decided I'd best wait at the car park with the bags, while the Fox caught the bus back to the airport. He eventually found the car hire desks in the departure lounge rather than arrivals. He got the keys to find he couldn't find where the bus went from to get back to me. He set off by foot, once more, getting lost a bit en route. Eventually he got back, hot, sweaty, thirsty & exhausted.

After a sit down, he set off on the next jaunt to locate the car - the far side of course. Eventually he found it. Naples airport is right in the centre of the city so we were straight into busy city traffic without chance to get our bearings or get used to the car or Italian road signs. Somehow we manage to find the motorway out of the city to discover the car was a joint manual/auto &, from the sound of the engine, we were stuck in manual. The book that came with the car was in Italian only. We eventually managed to work out how to get into auto mode & go at a better speed.

We finally got to Pompei to discover the left fork we were directed to go along was the second right on the roundabout & we had taken the first. Fortunately we had a street map of central Pompei & managed to find the hotel. We then had difficulty getting into the hotel garage, scraping it against the wall. Staff came running out of the hotel, & had to manually lift the car away. We discovered then that guests are supposed to park in the reserved parking across the street & the staff put the car in the garage as it it so awkward an entrance.

By this time our nerves were raw. We collapsed for a lie down. The car remained in the garage until yesterday. Meanwhile we've been catching up on our sleep, discovering Pompei's restaurants & generally strolling around the town. Over the weekend the excavations have been free entry so we had a look around some of them. It's a hard push. Unfortunately I couldn't see much, just sufficient to whet the appetite, but at least the Fox has been wowed.

Life in Italy seems quite different from that in England. Everyone seems out on the streets once its dark. People have been very kind & helpful. Few speak much English. In fact our best conversations with others have been in French! We're managing to survive. We even impressed the waiter at yesterday's restaurant by chosing & ordering something off the Italian menu which never appeared on the English translation version of the menu. Italian drivers seem to be as mad as expected, driving up one way streets the wrong way. That's not just us! The theory seems to be keep your eyes open in all directions. Anything can happen. They don't hesitate to do a U-turn in the middle of a busy street!

That's it for the moment. I'll maybe try to write a bit more another day.

PS Forgive any mis-spellings but the spell check doesn't seem to work in Italy.