Capri Is Heaven on Earth – But Hell to Get To

Who wouldn’t love an exciting and romantic trip to Italy? I presume very few. As incredible as Italy is, this narrative is not the flowery sort. It is a tale entailing the nightmarishly long journey I unwittingly set us up to endure when I booked our flights. Yes, all roads lead to Rome, but I learned the hard way that Capri is not at the other end. Well, not in a direct route sort of way. So, how does one arrive at their hotel on the Italian isle where Roman Emperor’s once basked? With a great big pain in the ass.

We could have flown into Naples en route to Capri before ending our adventure in Rome, but instead I opted for Choice B, which was to save a couple of hundred dollars by getting round-trip tickets. My failed logic presumed that since Naples is only two-hours from Rome by rail, it would be a scenic and uneventful trip between the two lovely cities--a trip well-worth saving the money to make. In hindsight, it may have been better not to have added another mode of transport to the already astounding litany of means necessary to reach our destination. Admittedly, the trek to Capri probably isn’t so arduous if you aren’t attempting it immediately following the red-eye to Rome, which followed a layover, which followed the first segment of the flight, which left at noon on the day before. It doesn’t help to have copious amounts of luggage, the biggest piece of which was designed by a logically inept moron who thought to place the wheels toward the center, allowing me the privilege of toting around a seventy-pound weeble-wobble.

In my own defense, when making the aforementioned decision, there’s no way I could have foreseen the unfortunate situations that managed to befall us. Already exhausted from the overnight flight, our first challenge was finding, and getting tickets to, the commuter train to take us from the airport (where I first experienced culture shock Italia style) to the much bigger Euro star station. To ease some of our fatigue and discomfort, we decided to splurge and upgrade our rail ticket to first-class en route to Naples, entitling us to a semi-private, climate-controlled cabin with extra cushy seats and food service. Yet after a great deal of difficulty involved in boarding this miserably hot and stuffy train, we were informed that the godforsaken air conditioning was broken. So, not only did we have the hassle of removing all of our luggage from said cabin after the initial hassle of getting it in there, we lost a fair amount of money in our first exchange with the Euro considering our upgraded first-class tickets purchased us seats to an insufferably hot two and a half hour excursion … in coach. They promised to refund us once we arrived, but as luck would have it, the validity of the voucher got lost in translation.

We eventually arrived in Naples and disembarked from our 150-minute sauna. Starving and exhausted, we secured a taxi to take us to the port. I, myself, don’t particularly believe in the power of prayer; however, inside this death trap which compares a ride in a NYC cab to a stroll through Central Park, I figured this would be as good a time as any to explore it’s capabilities. White knuckled by the time we pulled up to the port, we hurriedly escaped the vehicle and got in line to buy our tickets to the hydrofoil. For anyone considering a jaunt to Capri, I strongly advise you read my post entitled, No Cuts, No Buts, No Coconuts, before attempting to purchase these passes. Otherwise, your journey ends here.