As we neared the end of our time in Tuscany, Irene Gren, the young woman that we adopted as a daughter the last time we were here and who has taken over with her brother Eduardo, the vacation rental property business of her parents, spent quite a bit of time with us.  She showed us the house she will be moving into in Pergine Valdarno and the ongoing construction project involved with that.  We were able to go out to dinner with Irene and Eduardo and spent the entire evening talking with them and sharing a meal.  Irene would fit in so well at a fire pit back home where we solve the world’s problems.  Our time in Tuscany has been so wonderful, but time marches on and we found ourselves saying goodbye to Irene and Eduardo.

We left our friend, Irene and our villa in Tuscany on Friday morning, heading to Sorrento.  We had to drive an hour to the town of Chiusi to turn in our rental car which we did.  Yay, everyone survived seven days of my driving which should actually be quite noteworthy.  We all discovered over those last seven days that it’s not a good thing to have a left foot which operates the clutch pedal to be “dead” from some nerve damage where I can’t really feel where on the clutch pedal my foot is.  On more than one occasion as I was accelerating and shifting from one gear to the next, my foot would be too far to the right where I would also hit the brake pedal as I’m trying to shift….slamming everyone forward.  But hey, as they say, no one died, so all in all it kept our journeys exciting and everyone in the car had to remain alert as they had to be ready for anything when I was shifting.

We turned in the rental car, caught an intercity train to Rome (with about ten stops along the way) and then from Rome caught the fast train to Naples.  From there we took a shuttle to Sorrento.  Our shuttle driver in a Mercedes van thought it more important to turn on some entertaining music for our drive rather than the air conditioning in the 80 plus degree weather and the internal temperature of the van close to 120.  But, hey with the assortment of music like “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore” and then some song with Italian words that was the precise grade school tune of, “a big fat lady sat upon my hat, my hat she’s broke, it aint no joke, my hat she’s broke it aint no joke, Christopher Columbus now what do you think of that?” how can you not love that kind of music.  Oh and did I mention that it was at almost full volume?  Lovely.

Safely arriving in Sorrento, we checked into our hotel rooms which each had balconies to enjoy the 82 degree weather on Friday evening.  Sorrento is a beautiful, busy … beachy town, and quite different from 7 days in Tuscany.  Ahhh, lovely Sorrento!  Lemons are king here.  They are the size of a man’s fist or bigger and the lemon is found in all variations of food.  Lemon chicken, lemon fish, lemon pasta, lemon ice cream, Limoncello – that wonderful tasty lemon flavored digestivo that is served at the end of your meals to help digest your meal of course.  I know that CJ back in Florida really appreciates Limoncello!

Summertime has officially arrived in Sorrento and we started off on Saturday with Lynda and Barb stopping off at the local beauty shop for haircuts.  Doug and I offered to cut their hair but there were no takers on that particular offer.  Doug and I walked out of the salon to wait for our ladies to be finished with their hair appointments and we saw an old guy in a scooter fall over with his bike and hit the pavement hard in the middle of the busy street.  There are a lot of scooters here in Sorrento and the only real way to describe their movement throughout the city is CHAOS.  Scooter riders do not believe they have any lanes to conform to and they will approach on the right side, the left side or down the center.  It is crazy and apparently there are a lot of scooter injuries and death around here.  So this guy is down for the count in the middle of the street, Doug and I step out into the street to stop a large tour bus bearing down on him around the corner.  An ambulance is called, the cops show up in droves and oil that was leaking from a taxi which caused the scooter man to fall is cleaned up off of the street.  Within a half an hour, the old guy is carted off in the ambulance, the road is cleaned up, the police disappear and our lovely ladies walk out with their new coiffures.

Just another day in wonderful and beautiful Sorrento.  We decided that we needed to replenish our cash and so Doug and I walked to an ATM.  The one we chose was acting a little squirrelly where it wouldn’t really take my card but just sort of nibble at it.  I turned and told Doug that I didn’t trust this ATM and I was going to find a different one.  I set off and Doug stayed there to test his luck.  I found another ATM a couple of blocks further.  I got cash and walked back to where I had left Doug.  When his first question to me was, “Is your ESP operating at 120%?”, I had to believe that something bad had happened.  I glanced at the ATM which now had a handwritten “out of order” sign taped to it and I knew that wasn’t good.  The ATM had eaten his BECU card.

Barb still had her card for that same account and so their access to cash for the next three weeks was still available…..if she can remember the pin code.  They tried two unsuccessful pin numbers and we huddled back at our hotel rooms remembering it’s usually three strikes and you’re out.  This set off a flurry of phone calls….one to Kristin who is the Anderson family BECU banker.  She didn’t answer her cell so I called Jose to describe our plight and asked him to have Kristin call.  That international call dropped at some point while I was describing to him our situation.  I tried calling him back but the call wouldn’t go through.  In the meantime Kristin called and calmed the Anderson fears as best as she could.  Doug and Barb decided they now knew the mysterious ATM pin code and we walked over to my successful ATM and sure enough, that pin code was correct and we were in business.  Problem averted and we were all back on track for normal traveling life.  Yay!!  Access to cash in foreign countries is always good.

Another pasta dinner….that’s every day so far for me, and it was off to bed to get ready for our visit to Pompei tomorrow morning.