Pompeii, Italy

 Dreams of going to the lost city of Pompeii?

We did too, so we went! One of our days in Rome, Italy was dedicated to going to Pompeii. We hopped on a train to Naples, where we took a transfer train to Pompeii. Word of advice: if you have a Eurail pass, your pass DOES work for the smaller transfer train. We were told it wasn't and someone tricked us into buying tickets. When the conductor came buy, we showed him our Eurail pass just in case, and he accepted it. Don't buy separate tickets for the smaller train!!!

Anyways, we get to the stop designated for Pompeii and walked around FOREVER trying to find it. I would hire a taxi to take you to the entrance. I'm sure driving it would have been a quick 5 minutes, but we spent almost an hour walking around looking for it. The stop for Pompeii was a pretty small town, and there weren't a lot of people around to ask where to go. Take my advice, and buy the taxi. 

So far we had started our day off with quite a bit of walking, and little did we know we were going to enjoy much more of it. 

After you walk into the entrance, you walk around:

Walk around some more:

 

Keep walking:

Don't Stop:

 

 Almost there (and off in the distance is the volcano that buried the city, Mount Vesuvius):

 

 And around this time we kept thinking....where are all the perfectly preserved people we kept hearing about? I imagined them walking down the street, feeding the dog, or taking out the trash. Not so much. After another couple hours of walking (in the hot sun, amplified by all the stone around), we came across a crowd of people hovered around this:

 From far away, my initial reaction was COOOOOLLL, but once I got closer it turned into oh.....

It was actually pretty sad to see. All the people we found were obviously in extreme agony when they died. 

And frightened:

And I won't post the picture with the dog. It was too sad. 

So no, we don't regret going to Pompeii, but for me at least, seeing all the people wasn't as neat of an experience as I thought it would be. And GO WITH A TOUR. We were super bored hanging around looking at everything ourselves. We eventually started following groups of people around to hear all the interesting facts about the city and what happened. Bring sunscreen, and plenty of water! And get some meloncello (or lemoncello) next to the train station! Much cheaper than in any of the other cities that we saw.

Next Stop: Venice, anyone....?