2010 USA Tour : Pick Up The Harps Day

Thu, March 11th : Everybody Up! Its Morning!

6:00 am, I am wide awake, so I sneaked out for some PC work and coffee. Yes, the people here in the Naples hotel are all up for breakfast at 6:00 am. Quite basic breakfast compared to Kissimmee, and a long line to use the toasters and waffle irons.

Breakfast was also over and cleared up by 9:00 am.

Overall it seemed like the New Yorkers and other snowbirds up at 6:00 am. All other USA people by 7:00 am, U.K. and Irish visitors up and in for breakfast 8:00 am, followed by the French and German at 9:00 am, wondering why it is all cleared away.

As forecasted, not so nice day. Humid, cloudy, and quite a bit of wind to start the day.

Claire phoned the harp renter. Seems to be some delay in picking up the harp so Claire is off to a nearby Barnes and Nobles to have a browse while I continue some tour admin stuff.

Getting The Harp

We successfully picked up the rented harp from outside of Naples to the east, a bit hard to do from the west. Its a beautiful Wurlitzer harp, a small concert peddle harp with a very rich sound. Just the one harp, in the end, for this tour.

When we returned to the hotel Claire loved practising with it.

I still had a lot of of administration work to do for this tour, a tour manager’s work never seems to be done, so the rest of the afternoon became office work for me. The clouds did clear to give us sun so Claire made the most of this with a walk and a swim. Just as well as its early rise, early on the roads and a very tight itinerary tomorrow, Friday.

Evening In Old Naples

Claire returned from her jaunt to ask if we could dine at the wonderful waterside bar we were at the night before. There was no hesitation, we were off. Alas, so was everyone else. Its seems that Thursday night is Naples night out. There was a 2 hour waiting list at where we dined last night. I suggested we drove and followed the coast until we found somewhere.

That’s when we discovered old and beautiful downtown Naples. Its very much like Carmel in CA, but even more stunning in its presentation and sculptures. We found a delightful organic food restaurant absolutely and divinely swamped with flowers. Our table was surrounded by fragrant live flowering shrubs and more flowers on our table. Again, very nice pricing for an excellent meal.

Downtown Naples was fascinating by the age of its visitors. I think Claire and I were almost the youngest there.

The young ones were the 20 something toy girl models that accompanied some of the bright colour sports car driving very senior men. There seemed to be a lot of Hugh Heffner wannabes there. I heard on TV that Naples is home to more millionaires than anywhere in the USA so I assume these toy girls make a career of this.

I never saw any senior women with toy boys though, so Naples is a bit unbalanced.

We also saw no police, strange for anywhere in the USA. I suspect they remain discreet and un-uniformed here.

After eating and walking this wonder of enchanting beautiful downtown Naples it was back to the hotel for an early night, as the next day will be quite intensive. Vacation over for now, but it was a delight here in Naples. We’ll come again.