June 8th & June 9th 2024 Saturday and Sunday Travel from San Francisco into Sorrento, Italy Step Count: 9543

Today we are on a new Merson family adventure. We are off on our first Tauck tour to Italy. We will be doing a multi day, multi city land tour. We have been on a whirlwind of events the last couple weeks surrounding and leading up to Valerie’s high school graduation. We chose to shorten our drive to San Francisco international airport by spending last night at our Santa Cruz house. We flew non stop from San Francisco to Rome. We had a delay in departure due to a lot of traffic in SF, our crew got to our flight late and it delayed our departure about 1 hour. I stressed the whole flight to Rome as we had a connecting flight to Naples. We had to high tail it to through the international terminal and into the domestic terminal passing through customs. We had 20 minutes from the time we landed till the time we were supposed to board. As we arrived just in time at our next departure gate, they announced our flight was delayed. So we had plenty of time after all. We finally arrived in Naples and met our car transfer who took us to Sorrento. It was about an hour away and along the way she stoped so we could take some scenic photos. We arrived at the hotel La Favorita and it was absolutely beautiful. We arrived about 5:30 pm and had 30 minutes to freshen up and get ready for our initial meet and greet with the other 22 people we will be spending the next two weeks with. We met our tour guide Laura who is from Napa, Ca. There are lots of couple from all over the US. Michigan, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania just to name a few. There is one young lady from Santa Cruz, Ca and I look forward to getting to know her more throughout the trip. There is also a grandmother traveling with her two 16 year old nieces. One has much in common in Valerie and the other with Megan. They are very polite, mature and personable. It will be wonderful to have them on our tour. After our meet and greet we walked a short distance around the corner for our first meal. It was a delicious four course Italian meal. I had stuffed Zucchini blossoms, a pasta dish, lamb and tiramisu for dessert. By the time we finished dinner we had been awake about 29 hours, I didn’t get to sleep on the plane and it is already the end of Sunday. We have a very early morning tomorrow so we were fast to sleep after all taking quick showers to wash off the days worth of travel. So happy to be back in Italy, it’s been about 38 years since I was last here as a young teenager.