Climbing a Stairway to Heaven

Or hell? We decided to tackle the Walk of the Gods today, a “medium” difficulty hike that takes you up thousands of steps where you can eventually hike across the ridge of the mountain to Positano, the next town over from Praiano.

Those of you who know me well know I have difficulty walking, let alone hiking, so what was I thinking?

It might not have been as difficult if the path had been marked in any way and if we had had a decent map. At one point we realized the yellow markings we had been following were actually bird guano. Oops!


After lunch we told our very fit traveling companions to hike on ahead while we went at a more leisurely pace. Our undoing was the fork in the road where we went right when we should have gone left.


On the "summit" with the only sign of the day.


This is David telling me we had run out of trail.

We found ourselves on very sketchy trails where you had to actually slide down on your rear at the steepest places. It was when our water was running out and we were still almost in the clouds that we started to panic.

The water spigot belonging to the man below. Both were a welome sight!

We finally came upon a house, where the TV was blaring Italian soap operas and the owner was fast asleep. After filling our water bottles at his outside spigot, my husband prodded him awake with his walking stick and asked how we could find a path to take us home.

He walked us through his vineyard and left us at some real steps that he guaranteed would eventually take us back home and sure enough it did.

But after hiking strenuously for almost 6 hours in the hot sun, I was more tired than I have ever been in my entire life.