June 29th - Pompeii & Naples / Hydromania

Both Jacqui and Charlotte have heard or read about the ancient city of Pompeii and how it met it's dramatic demise and so Jack decided to take them on the bullet train to Naples and then on to Pompeii on a local train.  The ruins are very well excavated and preserved and the museum in Naples has a huge exhibit of artifacts.

We knew that Natalie would get nothing out of this little side trip so I stayed home with her and took her to go swimming at Hydromania - Rome's waterpark!  It was a strange cross between Sunlight Pools in Cincinnati (lots of screaming children and overweight parents) and the pool scene at The Cosmopolitan in Vegas (lots of loud dance music and bikini-clad millennials shaking their groove things in the pool).  What a mixture!  Natalie had a blast and I felt good to have done something that was fun just for her.  In the opening line of the kid's chapter of Rick Steves' guidebook for Rome he writes "Rome doesn't have a lot to offer young children".  After spending almost 3 weeks here, I can attest to that!  That said, later in that chapter, Rick Steves also wrote: "Our family traveled to Europe when I was a kid, during my “wonder years” — when travel experiences fed and shaped my core values about the world and my place in it.  Getting your children comfortable in the wider world is great parenting." I genuinely hope that he's got that right too!

The Pompeii / Naples crowd had a fun but exhausting day.  The temperatures have been quite manageable for our whole stay in Rome - surprisingly so.  Today though, the temperatures soared into the 90's and, if you weren't at a water park, you were gonna feel it.  Once they'd visited the ruins and the museum, they stopped at a much reviewed pizza restaurant for the best pizza ever!!  Naples is the birthplace of pizza and they do it up right!