Ischia

June 15-18 Taylor had a 4 day weekend so we headed off to the island of Ischia. (pronounced isk-ee-uh) We drove to Venice, flew from there to Naples, caught a bus from the Naples airport to the ferry port, caught a ferry to Ischia, then caught a bus to our hotel. Wheww! Lots of public transportation!

We finally made it to our hotel though!! This is our room with a pretty little patio.

View from our hotel.

The little beach area we walked to.

This was a little restaurant right underneath our hotel. It was pretty good!

This is what happens when I hand the camera to Taylor…I get pictures of the top of the umbrella at dinner.

This is what happened when I told him to take a picture of me eating the yummy foccacia they served. Can you barely see the foccacia in the picture?

They had these bright purple flowers all over the island. 

These were the flowers on a different tree…never seen anything like this before. 

The little town of Sant' Angelo. We attempted to climb that little hill on the right, but there were no trespassing signs.

This was their beach that you had to pay 20 euro just to walk on!

The buildings here looked different than others in Italy.

The island is full of small coves where people crowd to get a small piece of beach. It is very rocky and there are no sandy beaches on the island.

Because it is so rocky the water was super clear.

We found our way to Bai di Sorgetto which is a tiny little cove that has natural hot springs. Why we did this on a upper 90 degree day?? It sounded like a good idea at the time. 

There were a bajillion steps down to the water.

They had green astroturf wrapped around wooden boards so that people could walk out into the pools. The water was sooo hot. I had to go around, through the ocean, and into one of the outer pools because I couldn't stand the heat in the first pools.

A lot of boats anchor in this bay and swim to the hot springs or eat at the restaurant that is right on the water. 

Two of the nights we walked into the little town near our hotel and ate dinner. These were some of the views from our walk into town. 

They were having a Sagra (Italian Festival) that weekend and they had different countries flags lined up along the road. They were part of a fire work show that night. 

There were tons of people out for all of the festivities.

Here is Taylor pretending to tackle of the little mannequin people on the streets. Don't worry, he didn't do it for reals.

The next day we went to this Spa/Resort place called Poseidon. It was awesome. 

It had multiple swimming pools, a natural sauna, different thermal pools, and a nice beach. You could get massages, facials, and tons of other medical-ish health things while you were there. 

This was one of the thermal pools from the top of the hill.

Suppooooosedly the thermal pools are healing in nature. We were given instructions when we got there as to the order we were to get in the pools and how long to stay in each one. They started out cool and got warmer as we went to. 

The water has all sorts of minerals and what not in it. This place is very popular with older people who come and sit in the thermal pools. It kind of reminded me of the movie Cocoon.  

I cut my toe on the rocks at the Bai di Sorgeto the day before, and I wanted to test the "healing powers" of this water. So, I took a picture of my cut before and after. This is the before picture. 

As you can see everyone has to have some kind of hair covering. Most people wore swimming caps, but luckily we got away with our ball caps. This is very common at European pools I guess because Taylor and I went to a public pool in Vicenza and all the kids had on these swimming caps. 

I brought a shower cap from the hotel just in case they wouldn't let us wear our caps. 

This was the hottest of the pools. The directions were to stay in the hot pool for 3 minutes and then get into this freezing cold pool for 15 seconds. 

This is Taylor goofing around right before it was about to close. 

Taylor sitting on a cool little water fall seat.

After we went through the thermal pools we had lunch and got massages. That was an experience... 

The last half of the day we spent on the beach with ice cream and beer. Mmmmmm.

These are pictures of the island as we were leaving on the ferry.

So, the verdict on my cut toe…I know you are dying to know. These thermal pools didn't do much healing as you can see below in the after picture.

But, with some good ole antibiotic ointment and a Sponge Bob bandaid it was as good as new! :)