Navigation is
Made difficult by a large
Beard on one's face. Hm.
This morning was lovely. We slept in a little bit (it's not so far to Benevento... only about 80km and mostly flat) and watched Robot Chicken, then the hotel's dalmatian greeted us with friendly lickings as we prepared our bikes for takeoff. We coasted down the hill to a café for espresso, and we drew in our lines from yesterday. If you've looked at our maps (my mom has uploaded them to her Picasa for now (found at http://picasaweb.google.com/102231068694776133792/Maps), but we'll put them on ours when we get around to it), you'll notice that we like drawing little pictures of ourselves encountering various amusing things along our trip. For instance, we have a little picture of the scooter man who offered us brioche con crema (bueníssima, bueníssima!) on our map of Liguria. Anyway, I drew in a little picture of our reaching the top of Vesuvius only to find that it was closed. I forgot that we still needed part of the map to get to Benevento today... so Evan's beard--rather amusing in comparison to the size of the stick figure representing Evan--covered a mass of roads that we needed to examine. Oops.
Anyway, the part of the map leading us to Pompeii was uncluttered, so we had no difficulty in reaching same, at least navigationally. We did, however, experience our second car accident in three days when a man opened his door immediately in front of me. It wasn't so bad, actually; I managed to dodge mostly out of the way and clip my handlebar on the edge. It did give me a pair of nasty blood blisters on my finger, though, and it tore my handlebar tape. Sigh.
Anyway, Pompeii! It was much larger than we expected, and we didn't get the chance to walk through all of it. We did, however, receive a super-helpful guide to the entire site.
Pompeii was really unfortunate. The eruption of Vesuvius that buried it was in 79AD, and they were still recovering from an earthquake that destroyed most of the city about 15 years previously. I guess they didn't learn.
It was also a really old and really rich city; there were loads of houses on the periphery that had elaborate mosaics done in styles that spanned centuries. Due to the volcano cover, many of these were nearly-perfectly preserved. Pompeii actually wasn't rediscovered until the 17th century, and it wasn't excavated in earnest until about 100 years later, so they have had minimal exposure to the elements since the time of Ancient Rome. One colour was really prevalent: scholars call it "Pompeii Red," and it's rich and beautiful as a wall-covering.
Well, we have a guide that we will try to scan in about it. Our meandering lasted a few hours, and we weren't close to seeing the whole city. If we had it to do again, we agreed that we would like to take the Pompeii bike trail that leads along the rear of the city. It's a few kilometres, and it's essentially the only place in Pompeii with useful signs that have information. The rest of the city is navegable only by the guidebooks.
Out of Pompeii, we spent some time getting lost due to the aforementioned beard on our map, but we eventually made it to the No. 7, which heads directly to Benevento. A curious man along the way spoke to us about our trip (in French, thankfully, rather than just Italian) and informed us of a couple Germans travelling by bike in the region. Maybe we'll run into them sometime. :)
Keeping with our tradition, we stopped at a supermarket near our host's house to get a bottle of wine to thank him in advance. As we were choosing the wine, we got a call from him asking us where we were. We explained that we would be to his house in a few minutes, and that we had stopped to pick up some things at the supermarket in town. We stepped outside and were just packing the wine when a man strode up to us and said, "My name is Massimo, welcome!" Our host!
We stashed our bikes in his parents' garage (they own a bus touring company and had sufficient extra space for a few tiny bikes) and rode with him up to his flat, which was actually in a different town. By some amazing stroke of luck, he actually had an extra flat where we could sleep. So... we got our own apartment for the night.
We stayed up for a while with him, talking and discussing maps and plans for tomorrow. I think we'll stay another day here to rest up--Vesuvius was a beast to climb, and we have some extra time anyway. He's a pretty awesome guy, and he's the president of the Benevento cycling club, so he promised to show us a good route out of the city when we are ready to leave.
Goodnight, flat!