Just back from a week in Italy, a destination that we have postponed for various reasons for about the last three years. We have managed to have some complicated travel over the last few holidays, and this trip managed to conjure another splendid delay on the outbound leg, with a four hour queue at check-in. It’s either a feature of my age or my profession [IT in the financial sector] that I find these types of delay, and then workaround, absolutely infuriating. I understand perfectly why the UK’s third biggest airline doesn’t design high availability into their systems: cost. No matter that they annoy a few thousand cattle one Friday afternoon; the next day they are replaced by ones who look pretty much the same. I won’t fly with these guys again, but I know that it’s just as likely to happen with any other carrier. Oh, and the ‘workaround’: tell the people queuing nothing, and staff 3 out of a possible 15 or so check-in desks…

Anyway, we stayed in a clifftop hotel call the Grand Ambasciatori in Sorrento and it was fantastic: just the right balance between friendly and smart.

1/125sec at F10, ISO 100 at 55mm

Couple of unexpected features of the hotel that neither of us had encountered before: having to pay for the room safe [it needed a key], and getting one little bottle of shampoo and shower gel that is your allocation for the week.

We had this bruiser docked in the bay right in front of the hotel for the first couple of nights:

1/100sec at F4.5, ISO 100 at 98mm

It’s called the Octopus, and belongs to Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder.

We had a couple of interesting daytrips, first out to Pompeii. The most immediately striking aspect of the place, for me, was that it’s massive. I’d not really thought about it in advance but assumed that it would be over a few acres. Care of MotionX GPS – actually an approximation, as it eats the battery of my iPhone – I figure we walked around 7 miles over the course of 4 hours. It is just an astonishing place to visit: it is a simply staggeringly vivid piece of history:

1/160sec at F8, ISO 200 at 24mm

1/100sec at F4, ISO 500 at 67mm

I remember a picture of this dog from a history book from grammar school:

1/125sec at F5.6, ISO 100 at 24mm

This is typical of the technology that the Romans routinely used: this lady seems to have lost one of her contact lenses, much to the puzzlement of her male friend:

1/125sec at F4, ISO 500 at 93mm

The second of our daytrips was to Capri. I have to admit that I didn’t know anything about the island before the holiday. It’s a beautiful place, and very, very expensive. The standout for us wasn’t the place but the ferry crossing there: I’m Irish and way back in the 80s, and long before the advent of cut-price flights, I had a few hairy ferry journeys to and from home when I was at college. None of them came close. And it wasn’t just me being a wuss: my wife still has bruises on her arms where she was holding onto the rail at the back of the boat to stay in her seat.

1/125sec at F10, ISO 100 at 24mm

From a photographic perspective, I’ve noticed that, for a holiday like the one we’ve just been on, I could have got away with leaving 3 of my 4 lenses at home. I didn’t take one decent shot with my long lens, there were no very low light situations to justify taking my 50mm, and nothing worth breaking out my 10-22mm for. Apart from circumstance [e.g., no wildlife to warrant the 100-400], I think this is in part to do with my accommodating the exceptional quality of the 24-105. The more I use it the more it impresses me.

My eBook reader was fantastic. I read 2 1/2 books over the course of the week, and used a 1/4 of the battery.

I haven’t really mentioned Sorrento itself: birthplace of cannelloni, cliffside resort, and just a lovely town. Neither my wife or I had been to Italy before and we were both massively impressed. The food was fabulous, the people were friendly, and the parking of cars was more like abandonment :).

1/125sec at F16, ISO 200 at 28mm

1/125sec at F6.3, ISO 100 at 180mm