We never did make it to Naples. Our last full day in Sorrento we were both still lazy and I was in a very average mood. Boys, skip to the next paragraph if you are so inclined. As we talked about many months ago, I had a contraceptive implant called Jadelle put in my arm in January. The side effects vary greatly but for me they mean that in the time since I had the implant put in, I’ve gone from very frequent 7-day periods to having had three 2-day periods in 9 months. Only one of those has been during the course of the trip, and that was in Sorrento. Rather than being nasty with PMS, I just got very tired and in an over-tired mood. I couldn’t be bothered doing anything but at the same time I was getting frustrated with the lethargy of the last couple of weeks.
The bike needed an oil change and so Courts went off and did that while I wrote and surfed the net at camp. When he got back, it was too late to justify a trip into Naples and I couldn’t be bothered anyway. We decided to go to Amalfi but we never made it there either. Instead, we had a huge lunch at a cheap little eatery in Sorrento village and then rode down the slippery cobbled hairpin road to the port, where I lay on the beach in the shade and Courts explored underwater with his trusty snorkel.
And that was about it really. I people watched from the beach and tried to play games on the phone but with an emotional, hormonal PMS cloud hanging over my head I ended up engulfed in homesickness. I wanted to see my Mum and my sister and my friends. Most of all at that particular time, I wanted to see my dog. Courtney’s family had said that if anything bad happened to anyone while we were away, they wouldn’t tell us until we got back – no point spoiling the trip. I knew that my dog Toby and his sleepover buddy Jimmy had escaped out the back fence a few weeks ago and I started worrying that he hadn’t made it back and people just weren’t telling me.
While Courts watched fish and found dead crabs to pull the legs off for me (my favourite kind of gift – not!) and I watched obese children splash in the water, all I wanted was my dog. Like an overtired child with a pout and folded arms, I just wanted my dog and I wanted to be home and I didn’t want to wait 3 more weeks for it to happen.
The homesickness was entirely PMS related I’m sure but I do think if I went home now I’d be OK with it. At the tail end of Courtney’s Netherlands-Germany-Czech leg of the trip, I was starting to think I was ready to go home then, but the Dolomites and Venice completely renewed my travel lust. Italy was the country I was most looking forward to and I’m loving every second of it, but I’m thinking about finding a house and work and seeing everyone and a lot of my travel energy has already been used up by the previous 10 countries we’ve been to.
Funnily though, the same thing happened around the same time of my much-shorter American travels when I was younger. When I was about 80% of the way through the trip, like we are now, I was suddenly ready to be at home. That was only a 1 month trip though, and I did the second half of it on my own so it was a different dynamic to this one. Our next stops are Rome and Tuscany and I can’t wait for either of them. I’m very conscious of the fact that a month after we get home I will wish I could go back and relive these last few weeks if I don’t make the most of them now. I’ve told Courts that when we get to Rome, we are getting up and moving at normal times and exploring the city like we would have done London.
Next stop, Colosseum.
