Day of the Ghetto Fabulous Dan Brown Book Tour
We have finally arrived at our final destination…Rome. Today is our last full day of the official backpacking portion of the trip, and tomorrow Kelly and I will be flying to London. We have today planned out nicely in honor of our last day. During this trip, all of us have been reading Dan Brown books as we go. Kerry brought The DaVinci Code with her, and over the course of a few weeks we’ve all read it. Kelly then bought Dan Brown’s other 3 books and we’ve been circulating those as well. The best of all the books, however, is Angels and Demons, which takes place right here in Rome. I had seen on the news ages ago that people have been capitalizing on the success of the book by offering various “Angels and Demons” and “Illuminati” tours. Kelly and I had planned on taking one today until we found out that they start at 49 euros and head up from there. So, today we are taking ourselves on our very own “Ghetto Fabulous Dan Brown Book Tour,” which basically involves us walking to each place that was in the book and taking pictures with a little ghetto fabulous piece of paper. It is quite exciting.
We actually started last night when we were walking across the river in search of a movie theater and happened to come across an island in the river that was featured in the book. I was still looking at the island, trying to find a specific building that was in the book, when I kicked this big rusted metal thing in the middle of the sidewalk. It only took a second before blood was everywhere. Kelly ghetto rigged a bandage out of toilet paper and a hair tie. I stepped on a rusty nail once when I was a kid and remembered having to have a tetanus shot, so I at least thought to ask at a pharmacy about the risk of tetanus (the cut was pretty friggin’ deep), but they couldn’t understand what I was asking about. Luckily my mother e-mailed me and told me that if I do contract tetanus there’s only about an 11% chance I’ll die, so I’m encouraged.
Our last few days in Croatia were nice and relaxing. After Kerry left Kelly and I spent some more time at the beach, but on our last day it rained. It was just as well though, because it was nice to have it be a bit cooler for once. It was still disgustingly humid, though. We had to waste about 7 hours before our ferry left, and we ended up walking around in the rain for quite a while. The rain actually helped us, because when we finally got on the ferry we were allowed to sleep on the inside of the boat instead of the deck! Nothing but the best for us! The boat was so empty we were able to sneak into the “seating” area and stretch out for the night instead of sleeping in the lounge where all the other backpacker riff raff had been told to sleep.
We made it to Sorrento the next evening after a day of riding trains around for fun. The joy of the Eurailpass is that we can go wherever we want in one day for free, so rather than sit around at the station waiting for the train to Sorrento, we hopped on a train to Brindisi, went down there and had lunch, then got back on a train that took us straight back to Bari before going on towards the East. Oh well, we got there at any rate.
Sorrento was really nice. It had a nice atmosphere in the evening. It was amazing to have dinner and look out over the water and see Mt. Vesuvius. The day after we arrived we went to Capri, which was also nice, just not as nice as I had expected. It was amazingly beautiful, but we couldn’t find the beaches we had heard about. The Blue Grotto was also closed off due to rough seas, so it was disappointing that we couldn’t go inside.
Yesterday we had to get up early to get to Pompei before our train to Rome left. That was so much fun! It was so cool to see a place that I had seen so many times on documentaries and in history books. I had no idea how huge the site was. I thought it was really interesting to see a single preserved Roman building, but when I got there and saw how well-preserved the entire city was, I was shocked.
From Pompei we got back on the Circumvesuviana train to Naples to catch a train to Rome. A short while later we were here. We managed to get a really nice room in a pretty nice hostel last minute, which was nice. Today, after our ghetto fabulous tour, we’ll be meeting up again with Kerry and her two friends who are flying in today. Tonight is our last night together; how weird is that? It has been a long, wonderful trip. I’m so used to being around people 24/7, I don’t know what I’ll do when I’m back home and find myself alone during the day! I might have to start talking to myself…
Tags: Angels - Demons, Bari, Croatia, Dan Brown, Dubrovnik, ferry, Italy, Naples, Rome, Travel
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