BONUS 2: Whole Lotta Shaking

 At 1:25 AM this morning, Jane and I both woke up to the entire building shaking, heaving our bouncing beds. Joel would have slept right through if I had rousted him awake. Jane, in her sleepy daze, assumed there was a party upstairs shaking the hotel. Yours truly knew right away that this was an earthquake. I barked emergency orders at Joel: “put your coat and shoes on”. While we couldn’t have moved fast enough to avoid any building collapse, most people die in earthquakes from fire when gas lines are damaged. If it was a big one, I was collecting passports and the girl and skedaddling. We stood in the room as the shaking slowed, Joel still looking puzzled about why we were awake. As it died out, I puzzled that either a massive earthquake happened further away or this was a smaller one that happened very close by.  For a massive one, aftershocks might still warrant leaving the building. For a small one, we would just go back to bed. Checking on the European and USGS sites, they eventually recorded the earthquake as a 4.2 very close to our hotel.  After I saw that it was smaller and hyper local, I immediately went back to sleep.  When we discussed it the next morning, Jane was excited to discover she had encountered her first earthquake. Now if that isn’t an authentic Napoli experience, I don’t know what is.








Comments

  1. JEWMarch 13, 2025 at 1:59 PM

    Wow, reminds me of the time they announced that a tornado was headed our way. You and Chris just laughed at me when I suggested we get in the closet to take cover. I’m glad it wasn’t a massive event. Jane can log that in as a new life experience! Phew…

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  2. MikeMarch 14, 2025 at 2:18 AM

    That's quite a wake-up service! Glad your quake wasn't the prelude to a Vesuvius eruption nor a trigger for a tsunami in the bay. Pompeii Part II was not in the travel plan!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sylvia.griffith@gmail.comMarch 14, 2025 at 5:59 AM

    Reports of increased seismic activity around Naples have been issued for some time. I read that some locations have so much magma movement that the surface of the ground actually swells and rises, occasionally. The early wake-up call was a unforgettable Naples event!

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