9-night DCL Mediterranean with Greek Isles cruise - Day 13: Naples
Naples
This was our second time coming to Naples so we were looking for something completely different for this port than what we did previously (Pompeii and Herculaneum). Another family posted on our cruise meet group that they were looking for another family to split a private Amalfi coast tour with them so we jumped on board. I actually didn’t really pay that much attention to the itinerary because we had already talked about finding an Amalfi coast tour and this one looked like it hit all the highlights.
The Amalfi coast is beautiful and our driver was great, however, I think we didn’t need as much time at each location (and perhaps one fewer locations) than we were allotted. It was a long day and it started early. We were up at 6:15 AM, ate breakfast and were off the ship for our 8 AM pickup. It was about a 90 minute windy drive to our first stop, Positano. We stopped for some photos just before the town and then the driver took us into town, parked and set us loose for an hour visit there. Honestly, we didn’t really know what to do. We hit a public bathroom with a long line of tourists, then we had snacks and coffee and looked in some of the shops. It was cute, but again, like Plaka in Athens, or Oia in Santorini, just overpriced tourist shops with pretty much all the same stuff.
We regrouped and drove on to Amalfi where we were given another hour. And again we sort of didn’t know what to do. There was a cool looking church, but we didn’t have enough time (nor were we properly dressed) to go in. It was hot. The lemons were really big, though! Like, softball size! It was after noon by then so we were getting hungry by this point and looked longingly at people eating Neapolitan pizza. But we knew we had a lunch stop next so we didn’t eat.
We left there and drove back again in the other direction (which made no sense to me - it was basically an extra 20 minutes or so of driving to go back to that restaurant) to Ravello. Ravello actually looked really cool and there were some neat looking things in town, but we only had 40 minutes there and everyone wanted coffee (Roger), or gelato (me), or granita (Emmaline). So we found a spot and had all of the above and that more or less killed all the time we had there other than sort of looking around and getting a nice view.
I think for all of us, Ravello was actually the favorite of the three towns we visited on the Amalfi coast and if we had it to do over again, we would have preferred a tour with less driving (and especially the back and forth driving that the lunch choice caused), a shorter (and cheaper) lunch and two cities only (probably Amalfi and Ravello). All that said, I did enjoy seeing the Amalfi coast and our driver was good and we hit everything promised by the tour (I just, once again, need to do more research next time).
By 4 PM we were back on the road to go back to the port, taking an inland route that was a bit quicker, arriving back at the port a little after 5 PM. We got back onboard the ship and because we had another hot and sweaty day, we all needed showers again before dinner. While we all took turns in the shower, we also organized and began packing in earnest before heading to dinner in Enchanted Garden. We raced out of dinner because, yet again, it was show night between dinner seatings and we didn’t finish dinner until 7:40 and the show was at 7:45.
We ended up actually having pretty good seats for the Victrophonics performance in the Walt Disney Theatre. They put on a fun villains themed show and we all enjoyed it a lot. Then we went back to the room to finish packing and organizing to debark. Roger and I went to bed early. Emmaline went to see Ellis Lozano, went to a Vibe farewell party and also to the atrium “See You Real Soon” party.
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