Home Sweet Home

We only had a short stay at Home Sweet Home B&B after our flight, but the quiet countryside setting made for a sound night's sleep. Our route had gone Boston to Zurich to Rome, then we lost a lot of time collecting the rental car at FCO. By 9pm it was clear we wouldn't reach our original destination, so we looked on Hotels.com for somewhere else toward Naples and Pompeii. We found this place and arrived after 10pm. The man greeting guests at the gate let us in despite the late hour, showed us to a two bedroom room with a full bath, and our car was safely parked inside the locked gate. I think there were two other accommodations elsewhere in the building. The next morning we got up late and didn't have time to linger. I took a hot shower in the spacious bathroom, made tea with the hot pot, and had the mini toast and packaged jellies provided. The cleaning girl knocked while we were packing, and we told her we'd be leaving soon. While my wife finished, I took a few photos of the cute unit and the fairly large back yard. It had trees, bushes, and flowers arranged in two levels. We had to get back on schedule, so we packed up and nodded to the cleaning gal when we were ready to leave; she opened the gate for us. The villa and gardens were lovely to look at, and we appreciated the free WIFI since we hadn't activated our international calling and data plan yet. We also got a warm late welcome at the gate and a bottle of wine as a gift to welcome us to Italy. We brought it home for a family member, who thought it was the cat's meow. There wasn't much to complain about. The shower head seemed to be having a bad hair day, and the holder above us didn't keep it in place, but I'm sure that's an easy fix. Driving there at night felt a little off the beaten path, though that was my choice; Google got us there and the sign beside the gate was easy to spot. The location is a reasonable distance from an interchange between the A1 and the other highway that crosses it, so after stopping at Mickey D's we got back on the road south toward Amalfi pretty easily. One thing I learned: if you're going to use the App, you need the Italian version, since the US one didn't work. The free WIFI let us download it before connecting my phone to an international plan online, which was easy to set up and active almost right away. I really underestimated how much we'd need more than WIFI on this trip. Plans changed, and Google maps was essential. It cost $10 a day, and when we were together my wife tethered her phone to mine. If we got separated, one of us occasionally turned off airplane mode to get in touch, which cost much more per MB, but that hardly came up since we were together pretty much the whole trip. On WIFI, Google Voice can call any phone number, free for US numbers. Facebook Messenger voice and video and What'sApp worked fine too if the people you need to reach use them. I never tried Facetime, but I'm sure it would work as well. Being able to contact home was reassuring when the first day felt overwhelming. As the trip went on, we mostly sent texts with photos of where we were so people had a rough idea of our location.