What a beautiful night in London. 9:30pm and a spectacular northern summer dusk of striped orange, red, yellow and blue is painting the sky above Heathrow Terminal 5. American Airlines 156 from Boston to London was a nice smooth crossing. Landed 20 minutes ahead of schedule. Made a beeline for the Heathrow Central Bus station and now I’m on the National Express bus to Gatwick.
Will be hoteling at Gatwick tonight. Mercure, an Accor hotel. Dependably clean and a great value, the Mercure also has the extra advantage of being a stone’s throw from Gatwick airport. Besides, I like to patronage hotels with a business connection, and my friend Allen Krom works for Accor -- he is a good guy despite his one flaw as a diehard Yankees fan.
Tomorrow the Naples adventure begins. Pompeii, Herculaneum, Naples National Museum. Will use Sorrento as home base for most of the trip, except for Friday and Saturday when I’ll stay in Naples to focus on the museum collections. Will be blogging the sights and sounds of ancient Bay of Naples (as wireless connectivity permits).
Naples seems so far from the ‘civilized world’ of England. But 2,000 years ago Naples and London were both part of the same empire. Terminal 5 was built on the remains of a settlement that was continually inhabited from the Bronze Age through through the period of Roman colonization. One wonders how many Romans might have been born in the Bay of Naples region and then marched north through Italy, across France, and eventually across to England.
As the colors soften in the sky, it is worth considering how many Romans looked at this same sky long ago and reminisced longingly for their southern Mediterranean homeland. Modern travel has a way of experiencing in a week a taste of what these earlier generations experienced in a lifetime.
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