It's about 20-30 minutes to get from Sorrento to Capri, then you buy your Blue Grotto tickets right there at Capri. There are many boat options for the Blue Grotto, we chose the 2 hour ride around the beautiful island.
We got all the way to the grotto, and the wait was 2 hours, so the captain took votes and everyone decided to not wait that long. It was a little disappointing since that was probably the whole reason we came to Capri, or at least high on the list.
So we are lunch, walked around, did some shopping and enjoyed the views. We already had a 4pm boat ticket to get back to Sorrento, but we wondered if we could miss that boat and take the next one. One of the employees at the dock said it was no problem to take a later boat, so we decided to take that risk and try to get back to the blue grotto on the short 30 minute ferry straight to the grotto.
We jumped on the boat to the grotto with about 20 college kids, so it was a bit of a party boat. We got to the grotto and the line was much shorter than before. Most of the kids wanted to swim in the cave, but we wanted the row boat version. The row boats took each of he kids at few at a time, and we were last in line. Then the employees at the entrance of the cave said it was 5pm and the cave was closed!! Oh no!! I shimmied around and got us on the next row boat and sure enough we were one of the very last spins inside the blue grotto. It was even more beautiful than 6 years ago :)
We had no problem getting on the next boat back from Capri to Sorrento. The girls waited at the train station while I walked up to the hotel to grab the luggage. The hike started easy, but man, I must have burned at least 500 calories by the time I got up the mountain to the hotel. I jumped on the next shuttle and went straight to the train station, where we planned to meet at 8pm. Plenty of time to take one of the next 4 trains heading up to Naples.
Well, the train workers went on strike right at 8pm, so no trains or busses were available. Oh boy. We made lots of friends right there in the station and we all started negotiating with taxi drivers. The first offer was €150. No one wanted to pay that, so it became a big group negotiation. We ended up getting a group of 8 of us to pay €20 per person to get in a big van. Actually, that's not much more than the train cost and he took us straight to the front door of the hotel!
Honestly, we were a little nervous to stay in Naples. We knew we'd be fine, but it's not exactly the safest area with a family. It turned out that the hotel was absolutely beautiful! My oldest daughter and I went to their restaurant, which was up on the rooftop. It was pretty dark outside, so it took us a few minutes to realize that we were looking right at the Naples Duomo! It was so close it felt like we could touch it, so the size was impressive being that close. I think they custom made chicken nuggets for my daughter, with a custom BBQ sauce- and my truffle rissoto was amazing.
We went to bed and heard fireworks outside, so we peeked out to see them and then realized, oh, that's probably not fireworks. We didn't hear any police sirens or hear of any problems, so maybe it was just firecrackers or something, or so we'll hope!
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