Angie & Robbie: Day 24: Polignano a Mare, Italy

Friday, August 2, 2013

Today's Highlights:

-BEAUTIFUL Polignano a Mare

-Catching the ferry to Greece

Hey guys! Still in Bari!

We still had to kill one more day before catching our ferry to Greece at 7:00pm so we had an idea. Thanks to the advice of the beautiful Rachel Miles (Robbie's cousin who served her mission here), today we took a train just 20 minutes from Bari to a little beach town named Polignano a Mare. BEST IDEA EVER!

This town was adorable AND we found this little beach hidden in between cliffs, with tunnels and underwater caves and CRAZY cliff jumpers. I say "hidden" but there were still a bunch of people there. It just wasn't a huge, open, overpopulated beach. It was seriously the best beach day eva. We set up camp on a little ledge on the side of the mountain right above the water. It was the cutest.

So our first discovery was this cave we swam to in the cliff. I wish SO BAD that we had a waterproof camera because it was so stinking cool in there! The top of the cave was about 3 ft above the surface of the water (which was still so deep that we couldn't touch). The cave itself extended really far into the mountain. We swam for awhile into it, feeling brave and adventurous, and then we started talking about how this is totally the kind of place some carnivorous, underwater monster would live and we freaked each other out so bad we decided to swim back to the safety of daylight. But before we did, we saw this crazy turquoise light down below the surface of the water deep into the dark cave. I'm sure there was just another entrance to the cave somewhere and we were just seeing daylight, but it looked so crazy and mystical, I wanted to follow it. Hello?!?! Sci-Fi Movie 101: NEVER follow the weird mystical light! Robbie did though. At least for a minute. He even went through this underwater hole in the rock, but then didn't dare go any further in case he couldn't get back. It was CRAZY SAUCE! And we are both still alive so...that's good!

So I told you how the beach was hidden between cliffs, right? Well, there was no shortage of crazy boys jumping from INSANE heights into the water below. One kid jumped from a building on the cliff, probably 70 feet up, if not more. They were crazy. And of course, that made Robbie want to do it. But before we even headed over to the cliff, I made him promise he would only stick to the shorter ones. And although reluctant, he behaved like a loving husband who doesn't want to widow his wife, and he agreed. So we got our jump on (even me) and it was actually really fun. We defy death. We're pretty cool. (Not really Moms, they were really short.) But if any of Robbie's buddies are reading this, they were at least 100 feet. With sharp rocks at the bottom. And sharks. If you look closely you can see the guy mid-jump halfway to the water. Also, our secret cave is the big shadow at the bottom.

We finally left our beautiful spot to head back to Bari and get our stuff from our b&b. We got in and secretly took showers to get all that salt-water off even though we "technically" already checked out. We are the sneakiest.

We made it to our first ferry! It was huge and so fancy. It weirdly made me really want to watch Titanic. We went up top as soon as we got on and watched the sunset, so excited for this new way of travel.

But then we came back in when it got dark and realized we were severely left out of the loop. Every carpeted corner of the entire boat had been claimed by someone as a sleep spot for the night (the ferry was from 8pm to noon the next day). Turns out there were lots of bums like us who were too cheap to buy a cabin ticket. We finally found one short, narrow hallway where we could lay as long as we didn't block it from the crew members passing by. Our sleeping position for the night consisted of our feet and legs overlapping with our heads going opposite directions, as we each tried to snuggle up to the wall (so as not to be kicked out of this spot for blocking the hallway). Every time a worker passed by, we would jolt awake, scared we had drifted to the middle of the hallway.