Europe Day 15: Pompeii

The city of Pompeii is a short drive from where we ended our tour of the Amalfi Coast, or it should have been if traffic wasn't so crazy. Or perhaps this was normal traffic, and I was the one that was going crazy. I feel in love with Italy last year based on Rome, Florence and Venice. This year all it took was a morning on the Almalfi Coast and an afternoon in Pompeii for my love affair with Italy to begin to crumble.
Finding the ruins of Pompeii was not easy. We drove in circles in traffic that made me swear and want to pull my out my hair.





As you can tell from the above video, I was not enjoying my stay in Pompeii and I wanted to high tail it north as fast as our car would go, but since we were there, we stuck with it and finally found what we were looking for.



We spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the ruins and had a very enjoyable time..



Turns out this was not entirely true.
Apparently the people of Pompeii had at least 24 hours notice. There were tremors and mini-eruptions the day before which no one took too seriously, and then on the second day when the volcano erupted for real, it was the smoke and the fumes from that eruption that killed them as they hid in their houses. It was only after that, that the ash and lava would cover the bodies and then be found hundreds of years later.

... and then it was back into the car for the 5 hr, 702 km trip to Verona.