Pepe!

We walk down the winding stairs to our tour location; from here we are directed to our tour guide Pepe. We find that we are early; we thought we had to be there by 8:00, and it is quarter to (like we said always 15 minutes ahead of schedule) and the tour will not depart until everyone gets there, you know around 10 after. I guess that is Pepe Time because his times were always loose. Pepe is truly a character. He is the perfect tour guide who mixes interesting facts with humor. He is also honest about the attractions on Capri, which ones are worth it and which ones are over ratted.

We board the boat and by this time there is only standing room on the outside deck. We were literally the first ones on the dock and in Tina’s opinion should have been offered primo seating, but it wasn’t a boat for just our tour, it was a shuttle for all of Sorrento. So we stood in the back, got high on exhaust fumes and got our ear chewed off by a guy from Minneapolis.

Sorry Karyn, but he was a poor representation of your fine city. See this guy did not know we are both teachers (even though everyone else we talked to could infer that because who else has 3 weeks to “holiday” in the summer at our age). He proceeded to tell us about the downfall of American education, of course blaming the teachers. Tina was surprisingly quiet, and Jared employed his tactic of simply saying “uh huh” with a couple of “you don’t says” to make it seem like he is engaged. At one point Tina couldn’t stay mum and tried to point out that the family dynamics are very different today than when he was a kid and work ethic has also dramatically changed in a lot of today’s youth, but “Grumpy” just kept going back to the teacher’s and the downward spiral of American Education.

Needless to say we were relieved to land on Capri, meet up with Pepe and head up the mountain. Now we saw pictures of Capri numerous times in Tina’s guidebook, and she had all these plans to “explore Capri”, but both were extremely inaccurate. Tina had our day mapped out, we were going to walk from one spot to the next, rent a kayak and head to one of the grottos, and take a chair lift up to the highest point on the island.

Capri maybe an island, but it is really a mountain in the middle of the sea. It literally goes from one steep cliff to the next. Pepe directed us to a bus that would be taking us to our first stop, Ana Capri is one of the main towns on the island of Capri. Before 1877 (according to Tina’s guidebook, but if you ask Pepe it was 1874) Ana Capri was an isolated town. In 1874 or 1877 the first road from Marina Grande (where all the boats come in) to Anacapri was built. And what a job it must have been to build that road. You will notice some pictures of a very windy road that our “typical” crazy Italian bus driver took us on. You will also see pictures that shoot straight down the side of the cliff. Jared was grateful for the wooden fence (most likely put up in 1874 or 1877) that separated us from plunging to our death.

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