Day 80 May 15th 2009 En route to Praiano, Italy

Arose and packed up my remaining items. Gathered up a bunch of the food in the fridge and brought it out to one of the resident homeless people and dogs that live around the corner, doing a good deed. Met up with mother and Cara once more to head to Fiumicino to pick up the rental car. Haha our car is a Fiat Qubo, but we nicknamed it the “Blue Marshmallow” because its big and vibrant blue! Thinking ahead I also leased a GPS unit from AVIS to make sure we didn’t end up totally lost on the Amalfi coast. Man did this thing save our trip at some points. We nicknamed her “Guida” which is actually quite humorous considering the word guida is the third person conjugation of the verb guidare, to drive; so guida also stands for “It drives.” We jumped on the A1 autostrada and off we went for an adventure south. Things started to get very interesting when we got to the part of the trip where the road starts winding along the hillsides of Amalfi and the other coastal towns. The drivers are crazier than Rome! Obviously there are less intersections and all that city driving stuff but these Italians drive at 50mph along a 1 1/2 lane road still talking on the cell phone while eating and putting on makeup! It was all my mother could do to keep us from sideswiping the tourists walking on the right and the cars blazing by on the left! We finally found the entrance gate to the apartment and descended a steep San Francisco-like turny driveway down to our new residence. The charming little apartment with 3 bedrooms and 2 baths is an excellent fit for our party of 4, but what has your mouth wide open is the view of the gulf and terraced towns to the left and right. On our way to the apartment we had stopped in the town of Amalfi to grab some groceries and we ended up just cooking up some pasta and drinking delicious local Campania wine to celebrate our arrival in paradise.