My vacation began with the uneventful drive to the Newark airport. The roads were worse in Pennsylvania… but the drivers were definitely a little bit scarier in New Jersey. Apparently all of the Neopolitans came to New Jersey so the driving was just a precursor for when I arrived in Italy. I managed to snag an upgrade to business class for my flight there so I hung out in the polaris lounge for a couple hours. The food and drink selection was excellent, I think I managed to try pretty much every food they had with some seconds of the green curry over paella.
I boarded my plane early because I was excited for my seat. I probably annoyed Adela a little too much because I kept referring to it as my #lonewolf seat. The plane was setup in a 2-1-2 layout. I must admit I didn’t loooooove the seat by myself in the middle but that’s probably because I only have it to compare with the updated United hard product on the flight from Auckland to San Francisco. The meal was good but like my other flight you could tell it was just a microwaved dish basically. Not pre-plated. I watched half of John Wick 3 before falling asleep and watching the second half of John Wick 3 after four hours of sleep. I’m pretty sure the first two halves of the movie are exactly the same and I can’t really remember if there was actually any plot.
When I landed in Naples I had to wait an Italian amount of time to get through customs. I figured the plane ahead of us had to come from a country that didn’t have easy immigration into the EU because it took my about 8 seconds to get in. I think it took longer to say ciao than get my passport stamped. Allie sent me some very detailed directions of where to go which I only got when passed through “customs” and didn’t see here. I don’t know why I was surprised but the Corolla was like the perfect car camouflage for Italy. I think it might be one of the best running cars on the streets here.
Allie took me to the Italian imitation of Sheetz near the navy base… I say that because it was a gas station that had a restaurant inside that had a brunch/lunch/breakfast menu. With eggs. After breakfast I got my multi-day pass to get onto the base which means I need to always have my passport with me… yay. Allie gave me a tour of the base and then we hung out for a little while before we took a walk over to the hospital to meet Connor for some chicken fingers and french fries. Connor had to go back to work (American time! so actually at 1300) so I took a nap. I had scheduled an alarm for 45 minutes and after that snoozed like five times – overall a successful nap on the first day.
Connor had our itinerary all planned (he even foretold my nap) so our next stop was a drive to Capua to see the pretty cool coliseum that is still there. It was pretty impressive what was still left from like 1500 years ago. Although they had used the building itself as a stone quarry so there’s a lot less of it now than then. From Capua we drove to Caiazzo from some pizza from Pepe in Grani. The restaurant was on Netflix which makes it the second Netflix chef that I’ve said hello to! We tried to order a bottle of wine and three pizzas and ended up with three pizzas and two glasses of wine so we had to eventually correct that. With another pizza and a bottle of wine. I must say the pizza was absolutely amazing. I don’t know if I could pick a favorite out of all of them, but I would definitely eat all of them again. We got the “Mistaken Margherita,” Scarpetta, Mangibufalo and some other pizza that I have no idea what the name of it was but it had a bunch of amazing cheeses and bacon on it.
After our pizza we made our way back to the Navy base where I stayed up to an acceptably late time and then managed to sleep until an also acceptably late time. Connor and I got on the road at about 8:40 or so because we had an hour and a half drive to the Tenuta Vannulo buffalo mozzarella farm. The farms are everywhere but this place has a really good cafe and tour and happens to be close to Paestum. Our first order of business was to get some pastry and me some caffeine. We tried to order some cannolis but they were out so the lady recommend that we get a sbriciolata (which we had no idea what it was) so we said yes. Connor also got a hot chocolate which might’ve just been melted chocolate in a little milk.
After morning pastries we took a tour where our nice guide Stephanie showed us how they actually pull the cheese into individual little pieces and make the mozzarella braid. It’s all done by hand because the fresh cheese would stick to gloves and make a big ol’ mess. She then showed us where their buffalo hang out. The buffalo choose when they’re going to be milked each day and they don’t get to the feed area until they’ve milked. Before that though they all line up to use the automatic massagers. This farm keeps eight bulls and about 200 female buffalo. Any bulls that are born at the farm are turned into leather for their fine leather shop, the females are kept until they’re old enough to start having babies.
We got to taste some fresh mozzarella at the end of the tour and it was amazingly good! On our way out we also got some delicious gelato – I followed Lucia’s advice from Venice last year and got pistacchio to judge the quality of the gelato. I’d say it was pretty awesome. Connor got peach, but the word for peach is a little close to the word for fish so we weren’t sure if he was going to end up with a fish gelato or not. We then drove to Paestum which has one of the three best preserved Greek temples in the world. It also has the excavated ruins of an ancient Greek city (from about 500-400 BC) that we toured. We would have used their audio tour guides but they were all too out of battery so we found one on Connor’s phone, although the woman giving the tour had a little bit too strong of an accent at some points. The Temple to Neptune was absolutely awesome and it’s amazing that such a structure is still standing after all this time! Everything else was generally cool, and it was also cool to see the layout of the houses just based by where all of the walls were.
We wandered over the the museum which was pretty good and did a better job of explaining everything than the heavily accented free audio tour. Actually… it made it so the audio tour sounded like it was just making stuff up. We walked back to the car and began the drive to Feudi di San Gregorio – a winery south of Naples with some pretty spectacular views. I napped for part of the way and caught some snippets of a youtube we had on about the local organized crime syndicate in Naples – the Camorra. They don’t sound very nice. We got to the winery and honestly we had no idea how to get in. There’s like a weird stainless steel door that we later learned was supposed to be part of the winery experience but really just served to freak the customers out because they were enclosed in a small steel box with classical music playing. The winery didn’t fit with the classical 8 berjillion year old Italian vineyard field and that’s probably because it was founded in 1986. We eventually managed to get a tour and wine tasting because the very nice security guard let us in.
It was a really awesome tour and our guide was born in Long Island and had lived in the United States until she was about 9. It definitely made sense with the words and phrases she said… and of course the fact that her English was American and on point. We tried three wines and had some meats and cheeses and then learned a few more factoids about wine making than we had known before. When we got back to the base Allie had made some delicious carbonara that I scarfed down before I thought to get a picture because it was so tasty. We watched some New Girl and then hit the hay.
