We had a fun final day but it was a sort of an unsettling “travel day” where we had to pack up first thing in the morning and leave our long-time comfortable Airbnb to travel across town to the new posh hotel for all of one night lol
Now it’s morning, we’re gonna make one last endless hike into town, buy some secret Christmas presents from Christmas Alley, have a ginormous lunch, then somehow get to the airport (perhaps with all our luggage) and bizarrely end the day at Heathrow.
And now follows a good selection of Napoli graffiti, it honestly puts Sicilia to shame
It’s been a running joke the whole trip, starting from Matt. We sleep on awful beds, sit on hard chairs, eventually Matt finally blurts out “Why do Europeans hate comfort so much?!?!?” The pillows are concrete, the beds even worse, you sit on awful leaden chairs in a restaurant—-it’s a great question! Why do they obviously hate comfort so much???
We spent the time after lunch going up and down Christmas Alley trying to find what to buy… and eventually time was running out so we needed to get back to the hotel, retrieve our luggage & get a cab to the airport (joy!)
We had an idyllic glass of white together, but our future was quickly darkening: we were about to embark upon yet another insane cab ride—I am struggling to describe the traffic here, it is ludicrous but no one cares! In another reality, it could be calm normal traffic but I guess they just choose insanity, cause that’s what they have here… literally the worst driving in Europe, and that’s an amazingly high bar!!!
So yeah, another crazy death-defying rollercoaster to the airport—at least we can’t be positively sure about any resulting fatalities—but then finally, heart-stoppingly, the ride skidded to a final halt and we were free!
But after a typical cab-ride in Napoli, one is in a state… are we alive? Are we dead? We were slowly struggling onward through a confused haze, and then– suddenly–the heavens opened up and we beheld a miraculous sight:
For the first time in weeks we were actually hungry!!! So, did we do it? Did we really sink to those depths, that we would actually stoop to ordering from McD’s in the middle of Italy??? Had we no pride? Had we no shame?!?
HELL YES WE DID!!! OMG double-cheeseburger, best five euros we’d spent on the trip! Ir was demolished in about five seconds, so incredibly satisfying after weeks and weeks of “healthy” Mediterranean eating!!
After this moment, perhaps the pinnacle of our trip 😀 I sort of stopped taking pictures for some reason.
We flew to London but it was late by the time we landed so we didn’t have time to see any of the city, we just stayed overnight in Heathrow at the really bizarre Sofitel Hotel in Terminal 5. It’s a really strange place, felt a bit like one of those Monty Python sketches where they have business offices scattered around fields and streams… the hotel attempts to be integrated into the airport but the results are simply weird. But we survived, spent the night, and made it back into the main terminal area.
We had a direct flight back to Cincinnati, and the trip home was refreshingly boring–our flight to Cincy was only an hour late!
We landed, grabbed our ride home from the airport then spent the night in our very own bed for once. The trip was a true odyssey & we loved it, but we can’t deny that it feels good to be back home.
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