The Friday morning dragged as they often do when you’re waiting for a flight. Maggi had her bags at the door at 9 am, but we didn’t need to leave until 12. She therefore started to search for odd jobs around the house.
I worked on the computer and Maggi came up with a bunch of papers she wanted shredding. I suggested that I would complete the job. No, she insisted on doing it herself. Within 30 seconds She had jammed up the shredder. She spent over an hour clearing the machine.
A clean and working shredder restored we left to drive over to the Riley’s house. We left our car in their drive, to pretend they had an occupied house and set off for the airport.
A trouble free flight more or less on time. I fell asleep as we began to taxi along the runway. The next time I knew awoke we had almost reached the Alps.
Naples airport
When you arrive you want to move through immigration swiftly. It seemed as if this would happen as we stood behind the automated passport readers. Suddenly the readers stopped working. At first I thought the guy in front just didn’t know how to place his passport, but I soon realised the issue went much deeper.
All the passengers with British Passports now had to shuffle over to the manual desks. Th officers just plodded through each person and the queue slowly reduced. None of the six of us had any hold luggage and we soon found our taxi driver and left.
Herculaneum Hotel
We descended from our Mercedes taxi outside the hotel. We all stood open-mouthed. I opened the front door and asked the receptionist if we had the right hotel. We had. We climbed up two stories with our bags and found ourselves in a small room with basic facilities.
A quick visit to the loo and then we reconvened in the hotel lobby/corridor. Maggi had booked for six at the nearby restaurant a few doors away called Pappamonte. The starters of bruschetta and fried squid bodied well for our main course. I had grilled prawns and salad. The prawns with garlic and butter tasted good but the salad on the same plate had lost the will to live.
We settled up and walked the 50 metres back to our lock up.