In Sorrento, land of Limoncello and more Limoncello

The morning after our boring yet also riveting day in Naples, Deanna and I got up early and grabbed the Circumvesuviana (Campania’s regional rail service) to Sorrento, our next stop on our Southern Italy Odyssey. We arrived in Sorrento an hour later, and after figuring out which bus would get us to our hostel (it took longer than you would expect) we promptly got lost. The bus stop was only about 10 minutes outside of Sorrento, while we took the bus all the way to the Capolinea, to the Point of Sorrento. It was a nice place but walking around with a full suitcase in the heat and sun of southern Italy isn’t very fun. We went in to the Tourist Info nearby and figured out just how far from the hostel we were (pretty damn far) and grabbed the next bus back, luckily seeing the HUGE sign for our campsite this time. Not sure how I missed it the first time. Whoops. (that word comes up a lot in this blog, doesn’t it)

Got checked in, put our bags away. First stop? The beach at the campsite, which was nothing like any beach I’d been to before. No sand. Just rocks.

And some freezing water too.

After relaxing on the beach for a bit, Deanna and I headed down in to town to see the sights. The ones mentioned in Rick Steves were “Strolling”, a lemon and orange grove, and free alcohol. Strolling was nice. The Lemon and Orange grove was pretty awesome, the lemon trees had orange branches grafted on to them so the two fruits grew on the same tree (about half the trees in the whole grove are like this, according to the lady who gave us free alcohol). They also had a stand set up with a ton of different liquors, distilled from lemons, oranges, honeydew, licorice, blueberry, some kind of nut and a bunch of other things too.

Lemons and Oranges growing together... Mass Histeria!

The stand you can't really see clearly in this picture had tons of free samples

Next we went to walk down the main street in the town, which was lined with stores selling Limoncello (Sorrento’s famous lemon liquor), Arancello, Meloncello and every other kind of cello possible. All of these stores also gave out free samples, and they were sooo gooood. Too bad they only gave you a little taste, rather than a full shot or something like that. In other words, I thought store owners would be getting me drunk for free but all they did was make me want to buy their delicious product. So I did.

Also, there were lemons the size of your head

And bigger

We spent quite a bit of time there and then headed back to the hostel to rest up for our trip to Capri the next day!