Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

I'm back on my own again. It's an odd feeling, because I've been travelling with others for pretty much the entire past month. On the one hand I'm looking forward to the solitude and the autonomy, but on the other hand I've definitely gotten used to going with the flow (aka letting other people worry about the details). It takes a lot of self-motivation to leave a city you've just gotten familiar with in order to move onto a completely new place where you're starting from scratch again. Ah well, this is what I signed up for, right?

Sorrento turned out to be quite the pretty town, if not a little touristy. Its main draw is the isle of Capri which is just a short ferry ride away. My dad and I visited the island on our second day there and it was beautiful. There isn't a whole lot to do there besides enjoy the scenery, which is what I did. My dad got more adventurous and wandered off to the other side of the island, but I was still feeling pretty weak from the food poisoning, so I just kinda chilled for a while on a bench overlooking the sea. We ended up bussing around the island, which was a great way to see the sights. The roads there reminded me of pretty much every James Bond car chase scene I've ever seen, with sharp turns, roads built into the cliff, the Mediterranean right next to you.

The following day we left for Amalfi. If you've heard about the Amalfi Coast, it's all true. If you haven't, it's stunning. The drive there is the main attraction. I'm definitely not eloquent enough to describe the scenery along the way. Go get a thesaurus, look up beautiful, imagine a comma in between each of those words, and add “super” in front of all of them...that'll give you a small idea. The towns along the way are all built into the cliffs, which are several hundred feet high. The narrow road was built along the cliff, so again, you drive with the Mediterranean to your right, several hundred feet down. And above and below you are houses that leave you wondering how they ever got built in the first place. The road itself is very old, so it is very narrow. The bus honks as it goes around every corner to let oncoming cars know it's coming, since there's only room for one of them. If two oncoming cars meet and it's too narrow, one of them (and all the cars behind it) has to back up until there's enough room to pass. The curves are the best part, because it gives you a great view of the next set of cliffs jutting out over the turquoise water, a few miles away. If you're going to be heading to Southern Italy, it's a must see. Amalfi itself is one of the towns built into the hill, so as you can guess, it's a lot of climbing. Luckily this was the first day I was feeling like I had most of my strength back (I'm back to normal now if you're worried), so this was good timing. Again, aside from admiring the views, there's not a whole lot going on in Amalfi. There's a couple things to check out, but in the off season, there's not too much to do other than wander around. Well there's the lemoncello. Since it's so warm there, they have orange and lemon trees growing everywhere. So what a lot of people do is turn their lemons into the liqueur and sell it in bottles of all shapes and sizes. And thankfully, due to the wonders of supply and demand, it's usually pretty cheap. Very tasty stuff.

We took off from Amalfi to Salerno in order to catch a train up to Florence. The original plan had been to keep moving south to Sicily, but we had been enjoying ourselves too much along the way and kept booking extra nights in the different places where we stayed. Ah well. Aside from the drastic drop in temperature, I'm really glad we ended up in Florence. It's the perfect sized town for a backpacker... small enough where you can pretty much walk everywhere, but big enough that there's plenty to do and see to keep you busy for days. Plus, it's got butt-loads of culture. Sorry for the vulgarity, I just figured that phrase had never been written before, and I wanted to be the first. But it's true...lots of history as the former unofficial capital of art, philosophy, and wealth in old Europe. We did another bus tour of the city which was a good way to get acquainted with it. We saw and did most of the major sites, such as Ponte Vecchio, the Piazza del Michelangelo, the Uffizi art gallery, Il Duomo, and the Galleria Academia (most famously known for housing Michelangelo's David). Our second night in Florence, I did a bit of research online and found a good restaurant to eat at. Il Latino is an interesting spot...most people make reservations, but still “line up” (I use this term loosely...Italians don't so much line up as try to get in front of as many people as possible by any means necessary) at 7:30 when it opens. We showed up without a reservation, so after waiting a few extra minutes, we were seated at a table for 4 with an elderly Italian couple. There's a small chance they were from Naples. I don't know what I was doing wrong while eating my appetizer, but I do know the lady sitting next to me did. Every minute or so she'd mutter something in Italian, look over at me or my plate (not subtly) and give me a dirty look. I didn't help my cause when I went to take a slice of the bread from our shared basket and had to maul it because it hadn't been sliced all the way through. Surprisingly, they didn't take any bread after. My dad was having a good laugh at all this, because for once it was me screwing up and looking like a dork. This lasted for about 2 minutes until he went to uncork the bottle of wine and the cork went flying onto the floor, hitting the man on its way down. What can I say, we Wright men are some classy folk. The meal itself was great...we stuffed ourselves silly, as they brought out course after course. Even the after-dinner drink had an after-drink drink. My favourite part of the meal was when the old couple ordered a couple of steak florentines. The looks on their faces were priceless when the waiter brought out what must have been at least 40 oz of meat. It was Fred Flintstone size. Our turn to laugh at them!

My Canadian friend Liz had dropped me a line earlier in the day saying she was in town, so we ended up meeting after dinner for some wine and beer. It was great catching up with her and hanging out a bit more, since this will probably our last time seeing each other on this trip. All in all Florence was great.

I'm currently on a train, heading for Venice. Not sure when I'll be able to post this, since my hostel doesn't have wifi apparently (this was written on Saturday afternoon). I saw my dad off yesterday in the evening. It was harder saying goodbye than I thought. 2 weeks was definitely the right length for his visit, but it was hard seeing him go, knowing that's the last time I'll likely see family for quite a while.

A few words about my dad. Normally I wouldn't write about somebody like this specifically, but I'm pretty sure he wants to read about himself (because he told me so), so here it is. Travelling with him was great and lots of fun. It wasn't all roses though, and we both knew that would be the case coming into this. We've got similar personalities (including hard-headedness), but our travelling styles are very different. I'm all about trying to blend in as much as possible (as much as a 6-2, heavyset, pale guy with a 2 month ginger beard can blend in), whereas my dad...not so much. He has no problems walking around with a map in his hand, looking around to admire the sites while at the same time gazing for the next street name, looking confused. He's kind of a dorky tourist, but he knows it, and to his full credit, he simply doesn't give a shit what other people think of it. I'm being completely sincere when I say I admire that about him. Haha what I didn't admire was the travel pouch. This is one of those strapped pouches with a couple zippable pockets for stuff like your passport and wallet, to defend against pickpockets (Rome and other parts of Italy are notorious for pickpockets in his defence). He would wear it around his neck, under his tshirt, which made for a nice obvious square bulge. This quickly became known as the purse, and again to his credit, he took my ribbing with good humour. The most admirable part of his attitude is that he would always see the upside of everything. This is another way of saying he was easily impressed. Every other meal, he would declare the sandwich or pasta he was eating to be the best he's ever had in his life. Imagine taking a vacation where everything you experience is the best ever....that would be awesome! Me, I'm not so enthusiastic all the time...something I should probably work on.

So our differences in personality led to a bit of friction at times, but nothing more than any 2 people who travel together for 2 weeks would experience, and quite frankly much less than I was expecting. Dad, thanks for letting me join you on your vacation, I'm so glad we got to do it together. I appreciate everything you did for me. Love you pop, see you in the summer!

Here are some pictures from the rest of our trip. Again, they're off my dad's camera (I didn't even see some of this stuff because I was sick). Sorry if a bunch of them are sideways, I'll fix them as soon as I can.

Spoiler alert: It's Tuesday now and I'm already in Eastern Europe. But I'll bore you with those details another time. Also, ironically, I had the best gellato I've ever had yesterday...no joke