March 25, 2012 (Day 19)
This is what vacation is all about…..sleeping in, then eating a slow breakfast in the sun while watching the world go by below. The breakfast porch has a marvelous view of both the main road and also down into Positano. I couldn’t even count the number of cyclists that whizzed by on the road. There must have been hundreds. They all looked like true Italian cyclists training rather the more touristy cyclists out for a fun ride. I don’t think I’d want to ride this road since there are too many hair-pin turns, traffic, and parked cars to navigate around. Good for these guys though.
Our porch is a great place to spend the morning.....or afternoon
Today is Sunday, and we’ve seen signs around town advertising both a Beach Trail run and a Spring Festival today down at the beach. We packed up and started walking down the millions of stairs to the beach. Everyone is out and about! We haven’t seen all that many tourists this trip and we felt a little drowned in them. The funny thing is that this is a small amount compared to any tourist location we’ve been too. Still, it felt like hoards of people and we couldn’t figure out where they all came from. All the shops were open. We stopped in a couple lemon shops since the area is known for its lemons. They have many different types of lemons including huge ones nearly as big as your head.
Is this lavender maybe? Purple flowers hanging from many terraces and buildings.
The lemon shop smelled of sweet lemons and everything was yellow. Lemon honey is popular with Mark and limoncello is popular with many tourists as well. They also had lemon candy and lemon candles and lemon gifts. We finally found some souvenir tshirts as well. We haven’t seen too many tshirt shops this trip.
Finally, we made it down to the beach and the festival was going will full strength. There was loud music, lots of sun, people playing volleyball, kids running around, and everything you would imagine a beach spring festival to have. We walked around and noticed the finish line for the runners coming in. The runners all got their photo standing on a 3-tier stand.
One of the classic postcard views
The cafes were open, so we stopped to sit and have some lunch. In typical Italian and European fashion, the servers will let you sit at the table as long as you like. Even after we’d finished eating, we just sat and enjoyed all the people watching. There was an artist nearby painting. There were children comically carrying about their gelato dripping all over themselves and the sidewalk. The parents were chatting and laughing. Kids were kicking soccer balls around. We must have sat here watching the world go by for more than an hour before we finally asked for our check and decided to get moving again.
Since we were facing the beach, we were watching the sunny skies over the ocean, but once we stood up we saw some darker clouds coming down over the mountain! Then the drops came and got fatter and fatter. We ducked under a covering and waiting out some spring rains. I guess they did a rain dance at the festival this year. The rain was calming and we wished we were on our porch up top watching it fall. But watching it from under a store covering wasn’t so bad either. It let up pretty soon and we made our climb back up to our hotel.
View of the dark rain clouds coming in
The afternoon was spent napping, playing on the internet, and sitting on the porch to watch the evening drizzle. We decided with all the drizzle that we would eat our dinner in the room tonight since we had purchased two picnic lunches worth of food. We snacked on dinner while watching our tv shows and really just having a relaxing evening.
View down into Positano
Once again we have no plans for tomorrow, but we’ll see how the day goes. Until then…
The purple hanging flowers look like they might be wisteria.