A few months ago we heard Minnesota humorist Kevin Kling read from some of his stories. One of them gave us our tag line for this year. When asked if his bus driving job was boring because he drove the same route day after day, the driver replied ,“Not a day goes by when I don’t say ‘Well, shoot, I ain’t never seen that before!’” Well, not a day goes by when one of us doesn’t get to say that to the other. Today we could have kept repeating it while we did the Amalfi Coast.
We took the train to Sorrento and got on a bus and then gave thanks, often, that someone else was doing the driving while Rover could stay parked safely in Pompei. There is simply no way we could have driven her over that route. There isn’t a tenth of a mile of straight road: it continuously twist and turns--first up over some low mountains and then the along the coast--and we do mean RIGHT along the coast. It was an incredible, scary, beautiful drive. The driver blew the horn going around blind curves, which meant about once a minute. We got off the bus in Positano and walked down streets of steps,
had lunch, and walked some more. Then we got on another bus to Amalfi. This time we sat on the road side (so we weren’t looking over the edge down to the sea) and watched small cars barely squeezing by the bus.
Amalfi is quite a small town. It used to have 70,000 residents, but most of it and them slid into the sea in an earthquake in the 1300s. Today would not have been a good day for an earthquake. We bought some gelato and got on the next bus (the only way out) that took us to Salerno, where we walked around some more to settle our stomachs and get our weak knees functioning. Since this is a big city, stores were just reopening at 3:30 PM from their daily lunch break! We have now seen the burial vault of a pope: Gregory VII is buried in the cathedral in Salerno, along with the bones of St Matthew, we are assured.
We then made our way to the train station and came back to Pompei, completeing a circle of spectacular sight seeing. Well, shoot, we ain’t never seen that before, and quite frankly, we will never see it again. Once on that road is enough.