Day 1:

Ciao from Napoli! The first stop on our trip was Naples, italy (or Napoli as known by the locals). We stayed in an adorable place called Hotel San Paolo a couple miles away from the city center of Naples. One amazing thing about Naples, though, was that they had INCREDIBLE public transportation! We had a train station about a mile walk from the hotel that would take us just about anywhere in the neighboring area that we wanted to go for €1.40.

We arrived in the evening, so we walked around looking for some dinner. We found out we were staying by the Napoli Zoo, a theme park called Edenlandia, a movie theater, and tons of local restaurants and bars. Side note: unfortunately, Evan does not like zoos because he is a humanitarian with a belief that animals hate being locked up (probably true and we love him for it), so we could not visit the zoo. But I did look at it everyday and I figured we would prefer to go to the beach 😉

The first evening we got our bearings and found a place to grab a HUGE slice of pizza and an aperol spritz. We were both pretty tired from our flight and at this point it was around 11:30 pm, so we headed to bed and slept until noon the next morning! This was pretty off-brand for us but we obviously needed it.

Day 2

We packed up some stuff, grabbed our swimsuits, and walked a few miles to this absolutely incredible beach that was only accessible by boat. We sat down our towels, grabbed a spot, and tanned, swam, and hung out for the entire afternoon- it was dreamy!

Pro tip for those planning on traveling to Europe: it takes a few days to re-adjust your eating schedule. For example, we had eaten lunch around 12:30 when we woke up. Around 6 pm, we started to get hungry again/ the only problem with that was that dinner starts around 8 or 8:30 here, meaning that everything near the beach (despite looking super cute and romantic) was closed.

In the spirit of full transparency, both Evan and I’s hanger was at an all time high. Both of us were hungry, jet-lagged, and lacking knowledge of the Italian language. We trudged back to the top of the hill and found a really cute coffee stand, where we promptly ordered two cold cappuccinos. It was here that I overheard the comforting language of my mother tongue and quickly ran over to the two English-speakers. This was one of my favorite decisions of the trip so far!

We ended up meeting this amazing woman and her 8 year old son who were from France and vacationing to Capri on holiday. She showed us how to get on the train, which stops to take, and even helped us choose a place to eat. We talked with them until our stops where we parted ways, found a great pizza place in the square, and ordered pizza and wine.

Day 3

I went for my first run while on the trip! Strava has been my lifesaver (I’ll post another post about working out on the trip) so I found a run for 4 miles and did a quick loop around the area we were staying. Both Evan and I have just marveled at how safe every area is- you routinely see women walking alone at all parts of the day in Italy! It’s awesome.

After the run, we headed downtown to try to take a train to Sorrento then a ferry to Positano. when we got downtown, we discovered there was only one the whole day- and we had missed it! We decided to spend the day sightseeing downtown instead and got a fresh squeezed juice, saw some fountains, castles, and squares.

After our sightseeing, we decided to take a long walk to find a restaurant I had seen while on the bus the day before. We took our time, but ended up walking around 2.5 miles- ALL along the river! I’ll include pictures below of some of the incredible sights we saw en route to dinner.

When we finally got to dinner, we ate some yummy paninis and walked to the train station to head home around 11:30.

I’ve decided to write a Napoli part 2 soon (there’s just so many fun memories and photos) so stay tuned!! Thanks for reading yall 🙂

-Alexis and Evan 🥰