UK and Med Cruise - Day 7 - 11 September - Naples (Vesuvius and Pompeii)

Today's shore excursion was marked down as 'strenuous', and it was!
First stop was Mt Vesuvius.  They drive you a fair way up the mountain, and I have to say I was astounded by the skill of our driver.  We were in a full-sized coach, on a twisting, winding road where to be honest I'd have thought twice about trying to drive a car as big as the Falcon.  And, it's not like we were alone; it was a Sunday so there were many large coaches, smaller busses and of course people in cars and on motorbikes as well.
Lots of people were trying the climb:

The mountain itself was killer.  Paul - and a number of other people - decided not to try to walk the whole way.
I made it up to the guided areas and got a look at the crater before staggering back down :-)

I have wondered why people would knowingly live in Naples and even closer to the volcano.  Our tour guide (Rosaria) talked about this; she lives in one of the cities that is between Naples and Vesuvius.  They know that the next eruption will be bad; the most recent one was in 1944 and it closed the crater; it's well overdue for an eruption and the closure of the crater last time also apparently makes it quite likely that the next one will be violent.  Rosaria said that everyone who lives in and around Naples understands this risk but simply prefers not to think about it; they basically just hope that they will have enough warning to evacuate from the area before the next one.  I suppose it's the same as people who knowingly live on the San Andreas fault or in any of the other high risk areas of the world.
Anyway, after Vesuvius we got back onto the bus for a drive to Pompeii.  I'm not going to say too much about Pompeii; it was just astounding.  I had no idea it was so large, or that there are really significant areas still not excavated.  I'm also only going to post this one picture - there was just so much to look at and listen to that we didn't take many photos at all. This is an original ceiling, with the design and colours protected for all these centuries due to being buried in the ash:

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Overall, a really tiring day but well worth the exhaustion.  My phone tells me that I walked 10,505 steps for the day, including its interpretation of my walk up Mt Vesuvius as climbing 34 flights of stairs!