Our long trip to Gaeta turned out to be a glorious sail with the wind on our quarter. Five hours of pure pleasure, when we sat back and rode the wind letting the autopilot take the strain. I felt sorry when it came to an end and we furled the sails to motor in. We had planned to arrive well into the afternoon, but our speed under sail brought us in early and it was only just after two, rather close to lunchtime like our previous arrival in Gaeta, which had been somewhat stressful. John had forgotten, so I read excerpts of my blog entry to bring him up to speed. As it turned out this time was an entirely different experience. Our radio call was again answered promptly, but this time a marinera came out quickly in a rib and showed us to a much better situated berth for our size of boat. When John turned in there another marinera was on the pontoon waiting for us and the exchange of lines went very smoothly. By the time we had showered and changed the office was open, so we sorted out the paperwork on our way out to Hermes, the bar we remembered from our first visit. The beer was still most excellent. The marina now has its’ own yacht club restaurant so we had dinner there. We both started with prawn cocktails, served in a shallow bowl over a glass of luminous liquid our waiter said was Spritz. We could not decide whether or not we were supposed to drink it and decided not. John followed with a steak, I had pistachio crusted chicken and we shared fries and grilled vegetables. Then we wended our way back home to sit up on deck watching the lights reflected along the shore.