The bus from Praiano

Jo Anne

A few days ago we took the afternoon bus from Praiano (the next town south down the coast) back to Positano.  It had been a beautiful but long day of hiking on "The Path of the Gods" trail.  We were ready for some public transportation.  When the bus arrived it was full but we all still piled in pushing to the back of the bus and standing in the aisle.  The last people to get on, right behind us, had to stand in the door well.  We started the climb up, up, up, to wind along the cliffs between the two towns.  Traveling on a bus along this road can be a bit nerve wracking and standing while traveling it well,... it is something else.  Samantha was hanging onto Steve's legs for dear life.  I heard Ella say "This is crazy!" and then to confirm it asked "Mom, is this crazy?". Yes, it was.  The bus was navigating the hairpin turns along the mountain, beeping before entering every bend as a sort of warning to the cars and motorcycles coming the opposite way.  It was crowded but people were still in a friendly mood with most being vacationers.  Someone turned on a radio with dance music.  Looking out the window at the blue sky day with the sun glistening off of the Mediterranean, I thought just for a second, if we do go barreling off the edge it wouldn't be a bad moment to go out on.

Of course, I snapped out of that fast.  I went back to gripping the back of the seat nearby and holding onto Ella.  I thought about how choosing the perfect Amalfi Coast bus driver is a little like choosing a surgeon.  You don't want them to be so young that they lack experience but not too old that they may have lost those quick reflexes.  This guy looked about right.  I envisioned the lot of us in a scene from the movie Speed, minus Keanu and Sandra Bullock. I heard the bus driver ask the people in the door well to lean back so that he could see out of the right side of the bus. I said a little prayer.  I watched every big mirror that was posted on the blind curves for the purpose of being able to see cars on the other side as if I was going to warn the bus driver of impending doom.  And then we arrived.  The bus pulled into the stop with all of us still in one piece, as it appears they always do. 

Pathway of the Gods and Pompeii

Pathway of the Gods and Pompeii   - Steve

Our family takes a break while hiking the Pathway of the Gods

We are a full two weeks into our life in Italy, and I have yet to hear, "when are we going back home to our house" from either of the girls.  I'll count that as a small victory.  Certainly, they miss their grandmother, their two cousins (whom they are very close to), and their friends, but both seem to have adjusted quite well to life here in Positano.  On a typical weekday, they wake up on their own, have breakfast, and then settle in for whatever school lessons Jo Anne and I have cooked up for the day.  The focus has been on reading, math, writing, and a little Italian.  (I'm teaching them Italian, and since I don't speak it myself, God only knows what they will be speaking by the end of the trip.)  We are typically able to cover the bulk of their lessons by mid-day, and so after lunch we can wander out and explore the town.  The weather has been awesome and the Mediterranean warm, so many afternoons we've found ourselves on the beach soaking it all in.  At first, I wondered if this routine would get a little monotonous (the downfall of so many routines), but each day as I pack up from the beach and the lights in Positano begin to blink on, I find that I have thoroughly enjoyed the day.

Infused into our first couple of weeks have been two full-day excursions.  The first one was a hike along the cliffs that line the Almalfi coast.  Known locally as the Pathway of the Gods, this hike winds it's way from the rocky ledges above Positano down towards Almalfi (and possibly beyond for all I know.)  The kids provided us with a great excuse to take a bus to the town of Nocelle, allowing us to bypass the myriad of stairs that form the beginning of the trail.  From Nocelle, the hike is less strenuous and more breathtaking, and both girls romped through the four plus hours that it took to get to the neighboring town of Praiano.  My sister and brother-in-law are here to visit, so they joined us for the hike.  (Robert, my brother-in-law, is a great photographer, and captured some of the more amazing views along the trail, which I have posted here.)  When we finally arrived in Praiano, we found a great ristorante with a panoramic view of the coast.  We spent the rest of the afternoon rewarding ourselves for the effort it took to get there.  (Note: This hike is no walk in the park, especially coming down.  Kudos to the girls for handling the whole thing with so few complaints.)

The second excursion was a sort of field trip to the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, two towns wiped out by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD.  It is truly amazing.  The site gives you this great sense of what life was like 2000 years ago in a thriving Roman city, as well as a feeling of awe when you think about how quickly mother nature erased the whole thing (changing the coastline in  process.)  We had a rough start, with Samantha succumbing to car sickness just before we reached Pompeii.  However, after a trip to the bathroom and a new t-shirt, we were off and running.  We hired a guide, which was well worth the cost, given that the site is so large you could easily wander through it for hours and still miss some of the most interesting parts of the excavation.  Our guide also really helped us to understand hows similar Pompeiian society was to our own, and how advanced their culture actually was.  After lunch we rallied for a quick visit to Herculaneum, a Roman seaside settlement that is quite a bit better preserved than the majority of the ruins in Pompeii.  Even some of the original wood structures remain, although thoroughly charred.  While both girls were ready to call it a day by 4pm, they each seemed to enjoy their time in the ruins.  Ella was especially engaged with what she saw and the story of the eruption, trying to fathom how an entire city could be buried and the effort it would take to uncover it all.  I have high hopes that she will remember this, although our conversation at the end of the day suggested otherwise.  When my sister asked her what she had learned over the course of the day, she replied, "I learned that Samantha gets car sick."  As with most of us, our personal dramas trump historical ones every time.

A couple of surly shopkeepers at an ancient storefront in Pompeii.

Robert captures a nice shot of the day's end from our favorite beach.

Samantha and the cigarettes in Rome

Jo Anne

The first few days of our stay in Italy we spent in Rome.  We did a lot of walking.  On our way to tour the Forum one day I couldn't get Samantha to keep up.  She kept doing some strange hop and then pause and we were starting to fall behind.  I asked her what was going on and she said "Those things.  I'm afraid they are going to burn my feet".  Looking down, between the pebbles of the sidewalk, I could see what she was talking about it.  There was a web of cigarette butts.   Steve and I hadn't even noticed them.  I guess when you are three and a half feet tall, you notice what is around your feet every bit as much as what is at eye level.  I explained they were long put out and wouldn't burn her and all was OK.

We walked through the Forum and went up on Palatine Hill to see what was once the homes of the emperors.  It started to drizzle and then rain.  We took cover with a bunch of other tourists under a sort of archway or tunnel that was part of the ruins.  The rain kept going and it become clear at some point we were going to have to settle in there for a while.  I felt a familiar little tug on my shirt, and Samantha whispered "Mom" and then very loudly, "Smoker!!" as she pointed an accusing  finger at this woman just beginning to light up a cigarette.  It kind of seemed like the reaction you might give to someone say stealing a purse (of course then you would be yelling Thief!).  Unfortunately, the woman spoke some English.  On the bright side though, she had a sense of humor and I saw her laughing and explaining to her friends what had just happened.  We ended up sharing a laugh too and I tried to tell her how they teach the kids in school about the hazards of smoking.  I was paranoid she might think I had started a campaign to teach my kids to hate smokers. ;) I think she told me she was trying to quit.

I read a statistic that said 30% of Italian men smoke.  This could spell trouble

Limoncello

by Jo Anne

Limoncello is a very sweet, syrupy, and of course lemony concoction mixed with a strong alcohol.  It was invented on the Amalfi Coast and although you now find it in other places throughout Italy (we had complementary limoncello in Rome) this is its birthplace.  Our driver from the train station, Umberto, told us "The Amalfi coast is the only place that true limoncello can be made.  If you try to use a lemon from say California that is not true limoncello".  I believe him.  When we came to Positano on our honeymoon ten years ago it was the first time I tried it.  In all honestly, I tasted the BEST food I had ever had in my life here on our honeymoon.  However, I could not relate to the love of limoncello.  As honeymooners, we were offered a  complimentary limoncello at the end of almost every dinner, and inside I was always screaming "No, not the limoncello!"  You can't leave a complimentary drink untouched.  Well, it's ten years later, and we are back in this beautiful town with a few changes.  The biggest being we are with our two daughters, ages 7 and 5.  A smaller, but as I think about it, possibly related change is that I have come to love limoncello.  Hmmm…raising two young kids and a sudden affection for a new strong alcohol.  I could be onto something.

We are still in the infant stage here.  For the first few days all I could do was wander around in a kind of awe at the beauty of the place, the cliffs, the deep blue Mediterranean Sea (or the Tyrrhenian sea), the twinkling lights from the houses on the mountains at night.  I walked around with my gaze always up at the cliffs or down at the sea.  Ella and Samantha on the other hand didn't really seem to share this appreciation.  I'd say "Don't you think this is incredibly beautiful" and I'd get "Mom, look!  There are hundreds of ants coming out of the crack in this step"  It's OK though.  I remember being the same way at their age.  

At almost a week now, I'm starting to pay attention to more than just the cliffs and the ocean while we walk the streets.  There is the town cat we have to stop and pet everyday.  There is the man from the store that sells beautiful sandals that I would like to buy  (but am afraid to ask the price) that has fun teasing Samantha about stealing her shoes.  I've done my first couple loads of laundry in a very tiny washing machine with the instructions all written in Italian and actually hung the clothes out on a line that crosses in front of our balcony.  I was relieved to see they were still hanging there at the end of the day and not strewn all over the roof below or on the road.  I know the routine of walking to the downtown which includes a short stretch on this very busy, windy road that runs below our apartment.  The routine is I take Sam or Ella's hand into a sort of death grip, run across the road, put them on the side furthest from the cars, and continue to throw fearful glances behind me (looking for approaching Vespas and SITA buses) until we hit the stairs.  Clearly we are tourists, as I watched from our balcony the other night, a woman swaddling an infant in a blanket and walking with what appeared to be her mom very casually down this same stretch of road, no fearful glance to speak of.  I'm hoping to absorb some of this Italian "worry less, enjoy life more" mentality.  Although, I'm guessing I will do the death grip on this road until we leave….

The town of Positano, Italy

It's easy to get a good photo of Positano, even with just your iPhone.

In the Beginning

Steve:

Do you ever wonder about how you are spending the days of your life?  I was sitting in grid locked traffic on Maryland Highway 270, in the middle of the morning crush.  I remember clearly it was on a Monday, or a Tuesday or a Wednesday, and it dawned on me, I was exactly where I had hoped I would never be.  In the middle of highway bedlam, slugging it out with the other commuters in a scenario that would repeat itself the next day, and the next and the day after that.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy my work, love my family and our home, and recognize that I am a very lucky guy.  Still, I couldn't help but wonder if there was some way of wresting control of my life back from whoever had it (certainly not me) and spending the majority of whatever time I have left on this planet in a way that is more of my choosing as opposed to what has been dictated to me by a certain set of circumstances.  What if we just picked up and moved to, I dunno, Positano Italy and spent our time enjoying each of our days rather than slogging through them?  I didn't think we could really do it on a permanent basis, but it seemed like a worthwhile experiment for at least a little while.  In my mind, dropping out of the rat race for awhile could give both my wife and I a chance to reconnect through the shared experience of life abroad and exposing the kids to a new culture and language.  And so the plotting began.

Years passed, our oldest daughter started kindergarten, our careers had their ups and downs, and still this idea persisted.  I was estimating what it would cost to take a family sabbatical somewhere and how long we could afford to do it.  As the kids got older, I realized if we didn't do it when they were relatively young the proposition would only get tougher.  Jo Anne (my spouse) and I discussed it on and off, but it never really took the shape of a hardened plan.  Then one sunny day last June I was summarily dismissed from my position at my company, which like so many companies in corporate America, has been going through the convulsions of a re-organization on an annual basis.  The termination came with a severance for my nearly 10 years of service, and while no one likes to get laid off (myself included), suddenly Positano didn't look so far away.  Our kids are now seven and five, so the timing seemed almost ideal.

Fast forward through two months of hectic planning and we are all on a plane to headed to Rome, where we would kick off our journey with three days of limited exploration (like I said, our kids are seven and five) through the ancient part of the city.  The first day was mostly sleeping, but we managed to take in Palatine Hill and the Roman Forum, the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain over the next two days.   While Samantha (my youngest) seemed to view it all as an exotic new playground (she continued to ask when we would get to Italy), Ella showed a genuine interest in the things she was seeing.  Later, her drawings of the Colosseum would be evidence of the impression it made on her.

The train to Naples was a short ride, and we arrived at our apartment in Positano last Saturday to begin our family sabbatical of nearly four months.  The apartment is a simple three bedroom with a beautiful view of the Mediterranean and the town of Positano.  The biggest negative is that we are on the main road, so there is a fair amount of traffic passing by at all hours.  We were so taken with the view when we first arrived, it seemed to muffle the noise from the street, but now that we have been here a week the noise seems to have regained it's footing.  Still, with a only a ten minute walk from the central plaza and the beach, we are content with our little casa.  And the owners were kind enough to gift us a bottle of homemade limoncello, the lemon liqueur that made Positano famous (in bars, at least.)

We have spent our first week establishing a fairly pleasant routine of school lessons in the morning, then heading to the beach for the afternoon for a swim and to lie in the sun.  The girls are negotiating the stairs without too many complaints, and only a mention of the word "gelato" usually suffices as enough of a bribe to head into town.  For Jo Anne and I, the difficulty has been to not eat every meal at one of the nearby  restaurants.  Not only is it too expensive, but in my mind we need to evolve from tourists to townsfolk at some point.  We'll see how successful we are in the coming weeks.  

For all of you who have taken the time to read this, we will try to keep the blog fairly current.  This is my first experience with a blog (reading or writing), so please forgive me if it isn't up to snuff.  

Enjoy your day, whatever it may bring.  

Ciao.