Sunday, 9 August 2015

A trip to Herculaneum

Sunday, 09 Aug
We can now ticket off from our bucket list, ‘Sleeping in a Sulphur pit’. Being in a more active volcano was interesting, the bonus being the pool was a nice temperature due to the bubbling magma just meters under our feet *turning off hyperbole system now*.

We conducted our morning routine reasonably quickly and headed towards Herculaneum, a posh seaside town that was buried by 20m of volcanic ash from Mt Vesuvius in 79AD. We decided to visit that site instead of Pompeii as it was in better condition although Pompeii is a much larger site due to it being buried with only 4m of ash.

Dee had a bit of fall when she misjudged a step and twisted her ankle and skinned both her knees. The way she was grasping her leg, I thought she had broken something and started to look for a staff member but she called me back. It was then I realised all the site’s staff are at the front building and not actually at the site itself. Lazy buggers.

The town itself was amazing. There were quite a few mosaics and painting in the buildings and walking down the streets was a fantastic experience. A few comments were made by the girls that they were getting tired of all the old stuff we’re seeing and they hadn’t seen a single dead body yet. They finally did see quite a few at the end but they were casts of the originals. For some reason, Gene was a bit disappointed in that.

We were finished by 11am and that was enough for the day. As it was a Sunday, there was a market ‘somewhere’ and Dee wanted to visit. The problem with this is we didn’t know if it was within walking distance or we had to drive to it and try and find a parking spot would be hell. I thought we weren’t going to try for it and head for the night’s camping site but Dee thought I’d drive around looking for it. Remembering the first cardinal rule, we headed for the camping site situated on Mt Vesuvius. 

After a quite picturesque or terrifying drive up (mine was the former, Dee’s was the latter), we figured the camping site was no longer in business. We stopped at a café, took some terrifying or picturesque photos and confirmed that the buggers had indeed closed up shop. With the option of driving towards Rome looking for a camping site (with none recorded on the GPS) or further south to Pompeii where there were, we opted for Pompeii.


Tomorrow we head for Rome! Luckily, it’s a thriving metropolis and they’ll hardly see any old stuff there………..






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