Traveling in Italy - Day 2 – Movie Marathon and the Maid of Manhattan
My wife and I flew Aer Lingus, which is like Frontier and Southwest had a red-headed baby. The overseas flights were okay, with complementary food and drink. Domestic sucked. They did have movie screens! I decided to watch three movies, but a tail wind precluded the third watching.
First up was Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. I really like this film. It does a wonderful job of owning the Jumanji franchise. There are good callbacks to the previous film and it provides a good soft reboot. Also, whoever did video game research was spot on. I quickly identified what video game tropes they were going for and it was amazing.
Second was The Disaster Artist. I saw this on opening night in December, fearing a short run. It tells the story of the creation of the worst film in cinema: The Room. James and David Franco provide wonderful performances in this biopic about a young kid trying to break it in the industry and his creepy friend with unlimited resources. In spite of my terrible headset, this film is solidly memorable with great lines.
The pilot announced we’d be arriving about 45 minutes early, so instead of watching Justice League, I switched gears to The Big Bang Theory and Modern Family. Wow, those shows have gone in amazing directions. I hadn’t seen an episode of either since 2011. It was like catching up with old friends.
We landed at 5:30, before anything in our tiny terminal was open, so we headed to the main food court while waiting for our connecting flight to get in. There was a pub open (awesome) and a place to get Irish breakfast. My wife went for some yoghurt and I get the Irish version of bacon. Never get the Irish version of bacon. It’s lunch public school ham. We mingled with some people at the Starbucks and headed down to our Naples flight.
We were slightly delayed, which was good news for passengers connecting from DC, one of whom sat next to us. She was a musician from Manhattan moving to Solerno and she had amazing stories. We bonded immediately over our love of Naples pizza at Keste on Bleecker Street in New York. It was a fantastic flight.
We got to Naples where they didn’t even bother to check if we had passports. The airport looked rough, like they built it and forgot about it. We taxi’d to our AirBnB where our host popped out of a third story window like a Final Fantasy character and showed us around.
We ended up getting what would be our first of twenty pizzas. My wife and I got our own, since the prices seemed to reflect tiny pizzas. We ultimately discovered this Naples place was going to be a cheap place to visit.
We rested up for our hike up Mount Vesuvius.