Lemons

How did it happen? How did I let it happen? How did you let me let it happen?

You probably didn't, you probably didn't know it was happening, I didn't even put the pieces together until it was pointed out to me. 2 consecutive blog posts with pretty much the same joke at the start, the "we were looking at holidays in 'X' so this year our holiday was in 'Y'" joke, go on, go back and look.

I didn't mean to, but now I feel as though I should be writing these things more carefully to avoid any glaring repetition. - I'm not going to, it's too much effort, the start of this one is probably very similar to several others if I look back, possibly that one where I apologise for forgetting about a holiday.

Anyway, the point I was probably circling my way back round to was that it wasn't included in the last 2 posts just for a quick subversion of expectations joke, they both genuinely started with a search for holidays in a different place.

So this year we thought it might be nice to go to Italy, so this year our holiday was in... yea it was Italy. Sometimes by identifying a new expectation, the most logical outcome can become the surprise.

The destination we chose was Sorrento which is near Naples at around about the ankle of Italy. Before I continue, I want to talk a little bit about airport transfers, now before you get bored and skip straight to the next paragraph when I'll have stopped, I'm not being an anorak.

We usually buy airport transfers when we go on holiday, it just makes things easier, rather than trying to work out how to travel around in a different country after a flight, you just show a piece of paper to a person at a desk and you get taken to your hotel. Almost without fail the journey goes the same way, 1st a couple will be dropped off at a really posh looking hotel, then a family at an apartment complex, then maybe a couple of groups at the next one, this will continue until we're the only ones on the bus, then (possibly after the driver has taken a 10 minute smoke break) we'll be driven into a rougher looking area then dropped off.

This time was no different except this time the driver made us walk though that rough looking area, oh and there was still someone still on the bus, I cannot imagine where she was going. Ok, the area we had to walk through was quite nice really, but it's easy to be down on a place that you've been forced to walk through, he said it was 2 minutes away, it was.. Not.

To be fair the "rough" looking area always does turn out to be quite nice.

So, we finally got there, checked in and collapsed on the bed... Or we would have done if there hadn't been an unexpected incident involving the previous occupants, a towel and the toilet rendering our apartment unusable, so in a moment our entire holiday was shifted from the marina to the centre near the piazza.

The new apartment was on the main Roman road in the centre  and still had original 16th century pillars between the rooms, 2 (2!) bathrooms, a kitchen bigger than ours at home, with all the amenities you would expect, and a load more you wouldn't. Usually a place of accomodation will call itself an apartment if they give you a hotplate, this place had a proper oven and fridge freezer, a washing machine and a dishwasher.

Naturally we used it, only an idiot washes their own dishes under those circumstances.

So, holiday, lets cover some of the activities quickly  so I can get on with the exciting task of regaling you at length about the quality of Naples airport, I don't know about you, but my favourite part of any of my travel blogs is the bit where I discuss logistics, so if you're as excited as I am, lets get this next bit over with.

Sorrento was a nice place and being situated near the centre was probably better in the end, the marina was nice and we took a couple of trips there and witnessed a lady having some fish delivered to her basket on a rope, there were other things there, but that was my highlight, all things should be delivered via rope basket, it probably wouldn't make much sense since our house includes a ground floor, but I wonder if a Tesco delivery man would hang around slowly loading things into a basket for me... It would be incredibly inconvenient for both of us in all honesty, the novelty would probably wear off after the 2nd or 3rd basket, but that doesn't mean I could stop, as far as the delivery man knows at this point, my house is actually flats and there is some unknown reason as to why I cannot come downstairs to let him in, so I cannot suddenly drop the charade because I am bored of it, it must continue until the last bottle of Lemon Fanta has been hauled up into my window, we'll both be annoyed and tired, he will leave and continue his shift (which will probably end much later now thanks to me) but that doesn't mean I am finished, all of my shopping is now upstairs and I have to carry it all back downstairs because obviously that is where my fridge lives, and naturally I did not want to pay a bag charge so it's all loose. I think I've just put myself off this new scheme.

I got distracted by the basket there, the point I was starting to make was that being closer to the centre meant we could spend the nights out around the town, obviously we could have done the same if we wanted to while staying at the marina, but the long return journey would be hanging over us for the whole evening [insert some sort of generic night time photograph here in order to accentuate the point being made]

There were lots of tourist shops around Sorrento offering day trips to nearby places, one of the most common being offered was a trip to Pompeii, they started from about €40, but one thing I noticed was that not one of them included entrance to Pompeii itself, so they were effectively a seat on a coach and a tour guide once you were in there, we decided to see if there was any other way to get there, as it turned out, Pompeii has a train station right opposite the entrance and a round trip was less than €5, which is quite a saving. As for a tour guide... You don't actually need to get one, who actually likes following around a large group at the pace of the slowest member, having the dullest parts explained to you at incredible lengths and being unable to just stop and sit at the point you feel tired, so we just paid the entrance fee and wandered around on our own.

It's amazing how huge the place is when you're there, you obviously already know it is an ancient city, so it should be obvious that it's going to be roughly city sized, but for some reason when walking around ruins, I still don't expect them to be big enough to house, employ and entertain entire populations.

It's also incredible how well preserved the place is, a lot of work does go into restoring it and keeping it that way, but it's only all still here because it was buried under mountains of ash for thousands of years, that's not even a time-scale I can comprehend, my eternity to date has been 28 years and if I'm lucky I've got maybe 60 odd left, so I can only comfortably imagine one lifetimes worth of time passing by, multiply it by 10 and I'm still nowhere near how long ago this was destroyed. And the only reason any of this place is still here is because of the way it was destroyed all in 1 go all those years ago.

Speaking of comprehending, one of the most powerful parts is the structure with all of the casts of the people who were killed and buried in the ash, what thoughts are going through someone’s mind while that's going on?

As it turns out, the whole area including places like Sorrento is still at high risk if Vesuvius erupts again, what people will risk to live somewhere they like.

We also went to Naples on another day, my 1 piece of advice to anyone thinking of doing the same would probably be not to bother. Here's a photograph anyway.

That would probably be a good place to end the blog, at 1,480 words (before I started this sentence, which has undoubtedly boosted the count even further due to the nature of basic maths) it's probably already the longest post I have ever written, putting the word limit of early university essays to shame (so I'm told, I have no university education to speak of or to communicate via any non verbal medium)

I digress, I have promised you a discussion of Naples airport, you read all the way down here without giving up so I have to deliver on my promise (or threat for those of you that feel as though you have already devoted too much time to reading this to give up now, for that, I'm sorry for being dexter).

I have been to more than 20 different airports in my life, so I'm fairly used to long queues and tedious waits in sterile environments and some airports are better than others, but Naples gave a bad impression from almost the moment we hit the tarmac when the pilot had to taxi the plane around for about 1/2 an hour because he didn't have a gate he could take us to, when he was finally able to park, we were still unable to leave the plane for another hour as there was no bus to take us from there to the terminal building, but while heading through passport control we thought that should at least mean we won't have to wait for our bags before heading to our transfer, what a wonderfully hopeful utopian vision we had for the world, it must have been even harder to source a luggage trolley because it was at least another hour before anything joined the 2 suitcases and the cardboard box we all watched circle the baggage claim countless times that didn't belong to anyone, the whole crowd was hopeful by their arrival at first, but that hope quickly drained from everyone’s face, then it became funny, then tedious, then funny again when they seemingly changed order, like someone through those plastic curtains was just messing with us.


But we thought surely that is just a blip, Naples Airport has more than 100,000 passengers a year, surely most of the time it is well run, surely?

Well onto the return journey, when we got there we had to step into the 1 long queue for about 3 different flights which took about 45 minutes and that was before the 1 queue got forcibly split into 3 different queues, you know, just to make things extra fair. There was another queue at the security gates that similarly refused to move onwards so that took another 40  minutes or so.

Once past security we had about 45 minutes left until our flight so Rachael thought we should get something to eat, but I suggested we find our gate first, then get something, so we followed the signs to our gate, which led on to (you guessed it, possibly, what do I know) a third queue, just as long as the last 2, this time for passport control. That one didn't even make sense to me, all these people are leaving, why do you care Italy? They're someone else's problem now.

This left us past the gates so we had to struggle past large crowds to make our way backwards towards ours, while in this crowd someone mentioned that his plane was leaving soon, I joked that he was being daft and that none of these planes were leaving on time, it was supposed to be a joke, but it was another long wait for the bus, then the Pilot announced that we were waiting for a couple of groups of people, presumably known to already be in the middle of the mess of queues the rest of us had been lucky enough to wade through n time. Once the missing passengers joined use, we had a couple of minutes to wait before the new departure window, but when that arrived a further announcement told us that we could not leave, because for reasons they were still trying to ascertain, the ground crew had re-oponed the baggage area, because of course they did.

While searching for that piece of data from a couple of paragraphs ago about Naples Airport's footfall, I found the Naples-Airport.info website which provided this little nugget I will end with:

"Naples Airport, also known as Capodichino Airport (IATA: NAP) . It's well organized and connected to the Center of the City with public transportation." - My bold Italics.

Ideas above our station

Do you ever get a feeling like you don't belong?

We thought that we might like to go somewhere Scandinavian this year, perhaps we were leaning more towards Sweden, but there were no reasonable flights when we wanted to go, there were cheap flights to Denmark though, we could go there? Oh but as it turns out it's incredibly expensive when you get there. So we changed our minds and booked Riga in Latvia instead.

This trip started badly, everything seeming to conspire against us on the day we were setting off. I awoke early on this day in order to be sick, before spending the morning drinking ginger beer and attempting to do some last minute tasks.

Because I thought it would make our lives easier, I booked a form of airport parking where they meet you  at the airport, which didn't arrive on time meaning we had to drive around for 1/2 an hour waiting for someone to show up and take the car of our hands.

On arriving in Riga, we approached our transfer provider who advised us that the printout we had been sent did not entitle us to travel meaning we had to pay for it again (so probably don't bother using looking4transfers for this kind of thing, it appears they do nothing).

When we arrived at our hotel... we were welcomed, given our room keys and basic information and allowed upstairs. It was mildly surprising, part of me expected something to go wrong there too, if the same thing happened it would have been much more annoying, rooms tend to cost more than taxi's.

Riga's a nice city, there are lots of nice buildings, some statues, the odd park and... a cannon. There's probably a story behind the cannon, let's assume it's pirate related.

It's a fairly small city so everything's quite easy to get  to, most things seem to be either a 20 minute walk, 5 or 6 bus stops or less than €5 in a taxi away. From our experience. We didn't need to go very far though.

Day 1 took us on a walk around the old town, on a 10 minute 5d film tour of the city and up to an art installation named 'Benches'.

This is what I am choosing to share with you in picture form

Introducing the new animated segment of the blog, including 'The amazing walking Rachael' and 'The many directions of James' (4)

As you may be aware (which you probably are, because let's face it, if you are reading this, you are probably Rachael), back in January we played one of the room escape games in Warrington with Titch and Mundry, we... did not win, but we found there were a handful of them in Riga, so we decided to go on one, we found one called Mysteria, with a scientist theme to it, this time... We won.

That line would have worked better if we failed to do this one too, the brief moment of pretend suspense could be followed by the anticlimactic reveal of subsequent failure, but no, unfortunately for the quality of the blog (but fortunately for us) this time we were successful. 55minutes.

While we were here, we decided to see a show at the National Opera, they had tickets to a show called Igudesman and Joo, a mix of classical music and comedy, we arrived a little bit early for the show and this is the part of the story where we felt as though we did not belong, the part alluded to in the question right at the top of the post, which for some reason I started with even though I had no intention of writing about it yet. 
We sat in the bar beforehand in our jeans, trainers and hoodies, surrounded by men in suits, women in ball gowns and staff in waistcoats and bow-ties (possibly, didn't really pay attention). It was like we had developed ideas above our station and had our true place in society revealed to us quite quickly. The show was good though.

The following day we thought it would be good to do another room escape game, so we found another one, this was called findexit and had a Sherlock Holmes theme, unfortunately we failed at the very first puzzle. Could not find it. At all.

We walked up and down the street, asked neighbouring businesses and taxi drivers and attempted to enable roaming internet on Rachael's phone, when none of this worked, tired and annoyed we found a cafe with wifi and yes, it was far too late by then to go back, so we found another one somewhere else for a few hours later. Before this one, we had time to get something to eat.

Not only did we manage to find a restaurant we didn't seem to belong in, but one that no-one else felt like they belonged in either, it was as though the place was closed, but they decided to feed us to avoid any embarrassment.

Then we went to play our game, but not before doughnuts.

The 2nd days game was called Quest Lab and had a kind of sea captain theme, after our previous days victory, we were quite hopeful of a 2nd win and... yes, we won again, sorry about that.