The hundreds of steps

Tuesday, 28 June

The day started with some sweet breakfast at the B&B Locando d'Amalfi and surfing the Internet for some restaurants and paying for some ballet tickets for November. At around 11:30, we started our 800 meter walk to Spaggio beach. 800 meters never seems to be 800 meters in Italy. It's almost always double that with the curvy roads and hundreds of stairs down to the beach.

The beach was gorgeous. It was in a small alcove along the cliff with clear blue water. For two euros we got a two minute round trip boat ride to the other alcove that was more deserted. We laid there for a few hours reading our guide books taking an occasional dip here and there. Anders is starting to be convinced that I am more of an anchor than a float. It was very nice to also lay down by the edge where the water rushed on to the beach. The beach was not sandy, but big smooth pebbles. Amazingly enough it was comfortable to lay on, but not to walk on. We had a fantastic time. By the minute I'm getting darker, while Anders is still blinding white. He is determined to get some tan this trip before he heads off to Croatia. If I tan as much as he wants me to, I'm sure I'll turn race.

For lunch we had a simple pomodoro with mozzarella sandwich (again). I think we ate that at least once a day here. It's sooooo good and never gets old. Around 2:30pm we started our walk up the hundreds of steps back to the road to walk back to the b&b. I wonder if we are actually getting some exercise with all these stairs. Like Anders says, training our steel of buns...ahem...buns of steel?

Anders read about Ravello being a really gorgeous town on top of Amalfi. There was also a restaurant called Villa Maria that is supposed to have great fish and a gorgeous view. So up the curvy road we drove. It was a crazy road with amazing views. We had a bit of parking issue. We found parking right in front of the town (no driving through the town) but it was €5 an hour. So we drove a bit around and the further we went the cheaper it was. We finally drove down the cliff and found parking for €1 an hour, but this also meant walking ten mins up on stairs. It was a good exercise, but it didn't end there. In search for Villa Maria, we had to go through a lot of tiny streets, which was more like cute walkways than anything. With streets you also get hundreds of steps too. We finally found the place, it had a gorgeous view, but it was closed. They didn't serve dinner until 7, and it was just 5 and I was starving and acting extremely cranky. So we decided to walk into the center to get a snack before heading back to Amalfi.

Finding a snack was not easy with me. We walked all over town to avoid touristy spots around the Duomo. Eventually we landed on the Duomo piazza anyways. We had two pannini and beers. Anders somehow forgot he was driving and ordered a second beer, and I had to drink it for him. We got impatient with waiting for the waiter to come back to collect the money, so we left it on the table. As we walked a distance away, we saw a woman on the other table take the money and sort of cleaned the table. I reckoned she worked there, but Anders thought she was just another customer. Lesson leaned. Never leave the money on the table and walk away.

Back in Amalfi we just sat around the shoreline for a while chatting about life and the future. After a while we walked around town. In a town that you can walk through in 20 mins, I managed to get disorientated. Anders said my internal gps is broken :-( We went searching for Luna hotel, a place Ibsen lived for a while. It apparently wasn't in town, but we will drive by it the next day. Back in the room we relaxed and read freakonomics to each other as a bed time story.