Mt. Vesuvius - Normally the clouds are above me.

Off the boat and into Naples. We’re on a bus. The last time that happened, in Turkey, we had a bus wreck. We are two with locals who are giving us a ride to Mt. Vesuvius and then a tour of Pompeii. One of the guys is aiming for a Beckham look. He’s wearing jeans and a suit coat, with a few loud pieces of gold. He’s driving the bus. The guide is wearing his hair a little long in the back, a near beard, some unfortunate sunglasses, a baseball cap and a jacket.

While it isn’t especially hot — it did make the mid 70s today — it is June. It is an unfortunate choice, this jacket. It is white vinyl.

But he is a nice, soft spoken guy. Very funny. They took us first to a little place in Naples where they make cameos from conch shells. They are handmade, an elegant and traditional Italian piece of jewelry. No one is sure why we’ve stopped there, though, and we’re all ready to get on the road for Vesuvius. We walk around with mild curiosity and then take advantage of the restrooms. We’ve been forewarned that the facilities at Vesuvius are dirty and of poor quality. Europe really has to get it together on this one.

So we move on to Vesuvius. We go up what he calls the Mama Mia Road. It is steep, narrow and full of switchbacks and blind turns. When another bus comes down the mountain toward us he says “Everybody breath in, maybe we’ll make it. Mama mia.”

You drive most of the way up the mountain. At a certain point the bus runs out of road and you’re on your own for the last 200 vertical meters or so. The path winds around the mountain, so the walk is a good one.

Your Vesuvius walking stick.

After you hand over the tickets and make it inside the hiking part of the trip an old couple give you walking sticks. Our handsome, vinyl jacketed friend has stayed behind. He’s made this walk before and knows better, it seems. We picked up a new guide at the top of the mountain. He told us about the last eruption, during World War II. That was just a flow (from the hike up the mountain you can see the remnants of that eruption, it looks like an unfinished road) and no one was injured, but a more serious eruption in 1906 killed 100 people.

Seismologists, he said, expect the next eruption to be a violent one. Three million people live in the shadows of the volcano.

We took a lot of pictures.

We threw her in to appease the volcano.

I have three hastily assembled panoramas. The ascent. The crater rim. The city below. Click each and magnify.

We had to be back down the mountain by a specific time so the bus didn’t leave us behind. I had to run down the mountain to keep up. At the bottom the old couple were collecting their walking sticks. Sitting at an angle you couldn’t see while walking up there was a sign requesting a tip for the walking stick. Because we are honeymooning, and I’ve learned the role society has assigned to me, I had no money on this particular hike. The old Italian man didn’t speak English, and I couldn’t say “My wife has my money,” in his language.

I did understand what he said in reply, though. (My god-parents-in law are Italian.)

So I’m laughing as I make the bottom of the descent. I tell this to The Yankee, who says the old woman tried to get money from her. As The Yankee reached for her cash the old woman hit her camera with the stick. She said “No” and walked away. That’s some restraint; I would have thrown the stick down the side of the mountain.

Our tour guide in Pompeii, nice jacket.

Our guide says they’ve uncovered about 70 percent of Pompeii. They started excavating before the United States was a country. To see it all, he says, would take about 16 hours. In our two-and-a-half hours he gave us the highlights, including this temple. These columns were brick which were intended to be covered. There were no toppled columns or debris found in the excavation, so archeologists says this temple was still being built when Vesuvius erupted.

Life was very much in progress here. Our guide rattled off the food inventory of one of the bakeries we visited. So well preserved was the city that we apparently know how many chickens were inside. Or our guide has an easy, believable yarn.

Vesuvius from Pompeii.

We had another War Eagle Moment. This being, by the numbers, the biggest one I’ve ever had. I was taking pictures in the House of the Faun, the largest private residence in Pompeii, when a few girls said hello. They were traveling Europe. One of them, it turns out, may be one of The Yankee’s students one day. It was pretty cool.

War Eagle, ladies.

I count 18 of them, all in the perfect group pose. And notice the Faun in the bottom of the frame. That is a replica. The original decorated the impluvium, a basin for catching rainwater, is in a local museum alongside many of the other famous pieces of art from the house. The famous mosaic of Alexander the Great on display in the home is also a replica. But they replicated the damage, too, so at least there’s that.

There was an exhibit from Pompeii a few years ago at the Birmingham Museum of Art. People don’t often think of it, but that museum is top notch and was one of only two places the exhibit toured in the United States. So impressive was the exhibit, we saw it two or three times. Even still, Pompeii is an incredible place. It was a bustling hub of travel and trade before the volcano, sat hidden and forgotten for centuries and is now host to more than 2.5 million visitors a year. Today it felt almost peaceful.

Want to see more of Vesuvius and Pompeii? Here’s the gallery.

This is our last night on the ship. After we packed our bags and We sat on the veranda of our stateroom and watched the ocean slide by. In the morning we’ll have breakfast and sadly get off the ship for the last time. It has been an incredible cruise and a near perfect honeymoon (did I mention we had another minor bus wreck on the way down Mama Mia Road today?).

But it isn’t over yet. We still have more fun in Rome!

The Yankee in Mykonos, Greece.

We were in Mykonos, Greece today. The cruise ship arrived this morning and departed mid-afternoon. This is another place you’d like to visit a little bit longer.

There are just under 10,000 people in the island’s main town. The economy is centered on tourism. It is beautiful. Everything is bright white with blue or red trim. The streets are all old stone, maybe ship ballast, or dug from an offending hillside somewhere nearby. They are narrow, curvy and confusing. They were designed to throw off pirates.

The windmills of Mykonos.

The windmills are the famous image for this area. There are a handful left, they were once used to grind up wheat for the locals, though they are no longer operational.

We are here to shop. That, I think after only my second cruise stop, is the entire purpose of the enterprise. The cruise company is in collusion with the port towns and villages to get you there for shopping under the guise of sailing in luxury.

Not that anyone minds, clearly.

So we started working toward crossing everyone off the souvenir list. I picked up something for my mother. We got a few tiny things for others. We walked through the town, stopped in the chapels, looked at the restaurant offering today’s special: sun-dried octopus.

Right out front they had them hanging on a rope on a boat, fresh as a squid, drying in the sun, can be.

We demurred.

We checked out the windmills, watched the tide come in and walked around. We decided to retire here.

If, you know, Greece is still here by then.

Greece is in a great deal of financial difficulty just now (See that, rest of the world? Any of us could be next.) Germany and others in the European Union have bailed them out for a time. This happened just before our trip, incidentally. We’ve visited parts of three countries in the EU since then and have watched the Euro fall each day.

So if Greece is still here in 30 or 40 years, this place is a candidate. Athens may feel different, we’ll be there in a few days, but Mykonos is as isolated, idyllic and unaffected as you can imagine. Or at least that’s the impression you get from walking around in a place for six hours amongst people determined to find just the right thing for the aunt they really don’t want to visit when they get back home. That’s the impression you get while watching octopus skin glisten, wondering Just how long does it take to one of those things sun-dry?

We walked along the beaches, picking up sea glass. The Yankee and her mother collect it. She found some blue pieces which, I’m told, are especially tough to find. The locals just looked on and laughed.

“Silly Americans. Cleaning our beaches.”

I also picked up a few rocks. I’m going to put them on a potted plant’s soil one day, maybe a jade tree. Those, I’ll say, are my little piece of Greece.

Here are a few more pieces, in the form of today’s pictures. Just 17 in that gallery, but that puts us well over 200 published photos for the trip. Here we are at sea. We spent a few days in Rome,  you can see those here, here and here.

There are a few videos below, and cross-posted to the A/V page. I have one planned for yesterday and one for today, but it’ll be a few days before I produce them. There’s a panorama of Rome and also a panorama of Santorini.

Not too bad, so far as content goes. Tomorrow we’re in Istanbul. I’ll try to come up with something in the day’s adventures for you to enjoy. We’re enjoying it. This is a great trip. Take it if you can. Or, just send us again.

Our time in London

We had a layover and plane change in London. We stayed for about an hour. All I know of England I learned at Heathrow.

I grabbed a London visitors guide, because it was there, and stared at the currency exchange station and the HSBC ads which are posters displayed in the old Burmashave style. They are displayed in a series of four. The first three posters have an image and one word, like “responsibility.” One picture is a soccer player over a ball, maybe another is of a child holding something delicate and the last one is a goldfish fish in a bowl. Each of the three posters has the word “responsibility.” The fourth poster says something like “words mean different things to different people. If you let us datamine you to death we can know what they mean to you. And  by to death we mean every word. And by you we mean everyone. And by know we mean we can help you more. And by help we mean this is a little sketchy isn’t it? And by sketchy we mean we’re the world’s local bank.”

It is a brilliant campaign, but like my doctors, I prefer a bit of anonymity with my banker. Tell you what, you get the decimal plays in the right spot (or, failing that, err to the right) and I’ll make sure I don’t write bad checks. We can stop there and call that a relationship, mmmkay?

So Heathrow is nice. Two hours later we landed in Rome and walked onto the jetway, the thin, fraying, waterstained jetway thinking “This is some first impression.”

It got better.

We had to wait a faith-shakingly long time for our checked luggage. It could be in Norway by now and who would know?

The first American ad we saw was at the passport control station: Iron Man 2.

The passport guy ably demonstrated the disaffected air you’ve come to expect from government employees. Good to see that some things are universal. He sort of throws your passport back at you after stamping it on which ever page his finger opened. It’d be nice if these things were in sequence, but they stamp probably a thousand of these an hour and are as generally disdainful of the idea of long passport lines as you are, so that doesn’t happen.

We caught the train into the center of Rome, passing both attractive countryside and depressing and old apartment complexes. In the States I’d think they were some post-Nixon/Carter tenement or maybe a housing project, but it is unwise to make such leaps here. Most of these people have forgotten about that Nixon guy anyway.

On the train a woman across the aisle was listening to a blaring Kid Rock tune in her headphones. My second American pop-culture reference of the trip had to be that guy warbling on about Sweet Home Alabama.

My third was a McDonald’s, found just outside the train station where the earnestly helpful and entirely exploitive cabbies were happy to try and help us. Because we have luggage and are wearing the look of out-of-place, confused Americans he offered to take us to our hotel for only 30 Euros.

“Special price.”

Our hotel was in walking distance, even toting our plane-safety-threatening heft of luggage. We declined.

So we made our way to the Hotel Margaret which boasts, on both signage and website that they are a two star hotel. That’s oddly humorous as truth in advertising goes, but you’re in Rome, man, you’re here to see the sites, not be in the room and watching television. Or so I’m told.

Our room is small, but it holds the luggage, is clean and has a bed and corner bathroom. It will do the job.

Later we’d realize just how firm the mattress was. And then we realized the double is really two twins pushed together. After last night, though, that didn’t matter much.

Dinner was conveniently located across the street. The Yankee picked up a Rick Steves book, from which many of our trip plans have been created. She found a reference to the Ristorante da Giovanni. This is a where-the-locals eat place, which is the only way to travel in our opinion.

Ristorante di Giovanni

Steves writes, “Ristorante da Giovanni is a well-worn old-time eatery that makes no concessions to tourism or the modern world — just hard-working cooks and waiters serving standard dishes at great prices to a committed local clientele. It’s simply fun to eat in the middle of this high-energy, old-school diner.”

Giovanni has been there since 1948. The walls are homey and wood-paneled. Our waiter, a delightful, helpful and friendly old man who takes pictures with his guests, smelled of wood sealer.

The Yankee had tortellini, soup and eggplant. I had a three course meal of minestrone (in which I was a bit disappointed, oddly enough), rigatoni and roasted chicken, which was delicious. (Dinners here are served in courses, perhaps even in that McDonald’s near the train station.)

After dinner, which was late, but absolutely in keeping with the rhythm of the local culture, we stumbled sleepily across the street. We buzzed our way into the hotel, took the skinny little elevator up to the fourth floor and wrapped up the night.

Our three-day, whirlwind tour of Rome starts tomorrow!