Day 22

Endeavor Ship, Brindisi, Italy 6:44PM 7/12/10

Troy and I are sitting in a couple of lounge chairs by the pool on a large ferry from Italy to Greece. It's really more like a small cruise ship. I'm not really sure how this ferry boat works, but I think we're sleeping in these deck chairs tonight!

Yesterday morning we packed up camp and said goodbye to Sorrento. Then we caught the train to Naples, it had so many delays that it took almost 2 hours to get there. We got to Naples and bought our train tickets to Brindisi. Our train did not leave until 5:42pm and it was only 11am so we had some time to kill. Rather than pay a euro to use the bathroom at the train station, we paid a euro, got some ice-cream and used the bathroom at Mcdonald's next to the station. We stayed in there for a while and then we went to the creepy internet cafe we had used before to figure out our travel plans. We looked up campsites and ferry prices and decided to head to Patras instead of Corfu. It was closer to Athens and more convenient. We went back to Mcdonald's and got burgers and enjoyed the air conditioning a bit longer and then we headed over to catch our train. We still had some time so we went to the bookstore and bought more books!! Finally we got on the train and settled in for our 3 hour ride. the italian countryside was beautiful with rolling hills and rivers and cute little towns. We had a 7 minute gap between the train and the bus that we needed to catch and our train seemed like it was going very slow, so I started to wonder if we would make our bus. Sure enough, the train ended up being about 10 minutes late and we rushed off and toward the buses. We could not find the bus that said Brindisi on it and we were sure that we missed it, but Troy asked a resting bus driver anyways. He said Brindisi and he pointed to a bus in the far corner. Troy and I ran to catch it, not realizing that we had just been speaking to our own bus driver! We lucked out. We got to listen to the world cup final on the radio during our bus ride. Yay Spain! We go to Brindisi at 11:30 at night and found a nice little courtyard area with benches right outside the train station to sleep. I got to sleep first and Troy was supposed to wake me up in a few hours to switch off, but he let me sleep almost all night. I got up at 6:30 am and told Troy to get some sleep. He slept until 9am, then we got ready to head out and find the Brindisi port.

We knew the ferry didn't leave until 7pm so we had all day, but we ended up getting lost for a couple of hours in Brindisi, then we finally got the right directions and it turned out the port was about a ten minute walk from the train station, oh well! We got our tickets and there was a great park right there by the water, so we slept and relaxed for a couple of hours before our boat.

Then we got on the shuttle to take us to the ferry, we got to a security checkpoint and the officer did not even make us take our packs off, he had us walk through the metal detector, it went off, and he simply ushered us through! We got on the boat and claimed our deck chairs and we are ready to leave the port!