Italy Day Otto

Breakfast was at the hotel--packaged pastries, but they tasted okay. We really liked the cappuccino. There was a small grocery store outside of our hotel, and every day we got to look at these lemons. They were about the size of a football.

We did a little more browsing through the streets of beautiful Sorrento and found a tour bus to ride. It was really fun.

The driver knew his audience and played a bunch of Dean Martin and other cliche Italian songs that he knew the Americans and Brits would like...he even sang along and was very entertaining.

We went to a cliff above Sorrento, sampled lemoncello and lemon granitas, then cruised back to the town square. They claimed they would show us everything and if they did, there wasn't much to Sorrento. But we really liked the tour and the views anyway.

We got to see a big lemon grove. They cover the trees with a net to keep birds off the fruit. I would like to have one of these to cover my entire back yard to keep the grackles out!

For lunch we had street vendor food--hot dogs, sandwiches and fried cheese. Then we caught the ferry to Capri (pronounced KAP-re, not KUH-pree as in the pants, although I wore capri pants that day), a beautiful island off Sorrento.

The scenery for the entire ferry ride was beautiful and the water was a shade of blue we had never seen before. It was crystal clear although the beaches were very gravely.

We took a boat ride around the island and we loved it. For some reason, I really like to ride boats. Maybe it's because I've been landlocked all my life. Anyhoo....

We saw huge cliffs with awesome rock formations,

the white grotto,

the green grotto that had the most beautiful color of water I have ever seen,

and the Faraglioni Rocks. I have no idea how to pronounce Faraglioni, so I called them Fraggle Rock.

Let the music play, worries for another day, let the music play, down at Fraggle Rock!

Our boat guides convinced us that the famous blue grotto was closed, and we believed it. We shouldn't have listened. There were several tour companies taking people into the blue grotto...and ours was not one of them. The blue grotto is a sea cave that small rowboats can go into. Inside the color is supposed to be an incredible blue. We wouldn't know, though. The entrance is only a meter tall, so boats can't go in during choppy seas or high tide. I found this picture on the Internet, so it will have to do.

We wanted to rent a scooter and cruise the island, but the scooter rental guy told Scotty that he didn't have enough balance. We ate gellato and rode a huge ferry back to Sorrento.

We took a well-deserved nap, and then had pizza for dinner and walked around the town a little more.