The great safecracking incident

We were packed and ready to leave for the Sorrento train station - went to open the room safe to get passports, etc (including all my pictures on memory cards!). This hotel had pretty large safes, big enough for a laptop. But it was totally unresponsive although it had worked for 4 days just fine. So the girl at the desk came with a bag of keys but none would open it. The maintenance guy came next but no luck - evidently they could not find the master key but in "5 minutes" a technician would be there with another master key. Five minutes Italian time - 40 min later they said "5 minutes". After waiting about an hour in all, he arrived and after some discussion decided it had to be sawed open and asked if there was anything breakable in it! Then we waited 5 min for the guy who would cut it open.


After about an hour and a half, it was open! Punch line is that these are brand new safes and when they called the company in Milan that sold them, their suggestion was to "just have them take the safe with them" - I can just see that at security and passport control... LOL!!

The hotel was great about it though and removed our one room service charge and reduced the last day by 50 euro.

Started out almost 2 hours later than we meant to but the rest was without problems - 25 min walk to the train station, took the Circumvesuviana train to Naples, Eurostar to Rome, Leonardo Express (10 min walk from the ES train), and then through the airport to the hotel shuttle - I was glad to see the hotel room and put down my backpack. We walked around Ostia which is kind of a Rome suburb, normal downtown, not touristy at all. Found a sandwich and beer and went back to bed. Got up early to take 7AM shuttle to the airport only to find our flight delayed for unexplained reasons for 2.5 hours....hoping we will still make our connection in NY - although the airlines said, no worries, once they know the exact time they will take care of any changes needed.... :)

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