beach blessings
Paestum, Italy
We have seen a famous volcano (Vesuvius), accidentally driven on an unintentional detour through the buried city (Pompeii) and on down towards Sorrento (not that we got that far – it turned out to be like Genoa ie no parking, lots of cars, even more people and we knew we just had to turn around and drive back so we turned back when we’d had our fill of gorgeous coastline)…..what the Riviera and more recently the Bay of Naples failed to provide, we have discovered further south.
A beach. With warm golden sand. Sea as tepid as a bath, gently shelving out towards the deep. Relatively few people. Just enough umbrellas and brightly painted changing sheds to look cute.
Three metre high shadecloth to park our vans under. Toilets. A huge sink for doing laundry and washing feet in. Power. An erratic mobile phone connection so we can use internet…sometimes. No mosquitoes (just a few jellyfish late in the day). Free cold showers – that’s a real shower you can stand under, not a bowl of water to splash about in. Mboy6 found two euros on the ground so he treated himself (and shared with everyone) a shaved ice with lemon syrup….and still had change left over.
Just a short walk away are all the food shops we could possibly need – both supermarket-ish for bread, cheese, salami, tomato sauce and pasta, and cafe style for pizza, gelato, iced lemon, pastries, mussels and salads, two sausages and french fries in a bread roll……and more little beach gear stores than you can shake a stick at.
The temperature continues to fluctuate around the high thirties by day, and now at ten at night it is still above thirty in the van. Definitely feels summery. Humid too. The north was a much drier heat; down here almost at the toe of the boot it feels much more like the heat of Asia. Sweats drips. Clothes do not dry as fast in spite of the temperature. But if we are tempted to complain (which some have been now that the humidity has taken away the pure pleasure of sunshine), we remember the rain and rejoice when we get an email from England “We’ve just returned from a wet and windy weekend in west Scotland…”
It’s not raining here…YAY.
It’s not cold…YAY.
It’s hot enough to get clothes dry…YAY.
We found a park at the beach…YAY.
A beautiful beach…YAY.
With sand…YAY.
And shade…YAY.
And water…YAY.
We are blessed…YAY.
Tags: 2008/09, postcard: Italy, recreation, weather
rayres
Wow, those beaches… I’ve never seen any so packed.
Those are impressive sandcastles!
ohhh idyllic! (well minus 1000 people it would be anyway 😉 ) i bet you were all so gutted to accidentally venture through Pompeii too…
“It’s not cold…YAY”. Lol… I remember when going into China you were excited to actually go INTO the cold!!