The Islands

Well, we made it home. Back to where the rain is plentiful and the temperature is half of what it was when we left Italy. Sigh. But I want to share about the last week of our trip! Last Saturday, we ventured off from Cefalu' by train to Milazzo, a 2 hour train ride. We caught a hydrofoil ferry from Milazzo to Lipari, where we were picked up by our hotel manager, who spoke zero English. You can communicate more than you think with someone who does not speak the same language. As we zipped through the curvy mountainside, we peered over the sharp cliffs into the deep, azure blue waters of the sea. It was absolutely stunning. There were tons of big, beautiful boats. Our guide pointed out one massive yacht and from what we could interpret, it belongs to an Italian soccer star or coach.

We arrived at our hotel and it was beautiful. Out hotel was pretty cheap because it's so far out of the main town(10 minutes is so far on an island that small). We walked into our room and were amazed by the views out our window and the doors that opened up onto our terrace, overlooking the sea. It was at that time I decided not to go back to the Netherlands.

The next day we took the bus into town and rented a scooter. I was very nervous about this endeavor for many reasons. 1. My husband likes to drive things fast and believes he is the world's best driver, which he is a good driver but these were unknown roads with sharp drop offs into the sea. 2. Have you ever seen Italians drive? There are no laws it seems, just every man for himself. Not a single stoplight on the whole island. 3. How safe can you really be on a scooter?
But it was also exciting to think about getting around that way so I hopped on the back and off we went. I can admit it, I was scared half the time. It seemed like we were going super fast(we weren't, maybe we topped out at 50 mph, on a straightaway), and I was convinced that every turn we were going to be flipping the bike over. But it was still a great time and so much fun to have the wind in your face and feel like a real Italian.  The scooter allowed us to drive all over the island. We went up and down hills, around the mountain, down steep hills that we had to get off and push the bike to get back up. It was great.

We spent most of our time relaxing on the beach, riding around the island, and living the dream. :)  Before we knew it, it was time to pack up and head back to the mainland, where we would spend our last night. This is where we started to run into trouble.

When we got to Palermo, after an hour ferry ride and a 3 hour train ride, we were hot and tired. However, we did not know the name of our hotel or where it was located. I was trying to be more "carefree" as Dan likes, and so had just booked our hotel while we were in Cefalu. I thought we would have internet at our hotel in Lipari so I didn't write anything down. Big mistake. So we wondered around Palermo for 45 minutes in the hot sun, dragging very heavy suitcases and bags with us. I was convinced that our hotel started with the letter "B" so I asked random people but nothing rung  a bell. Finally we had to go to an internet cafe, which looked like it was ran by terrorists, and google search it until I found the one that looked familiar. Luckily, I found it and we made it there safely. We might be on a terrorist watch list now but whatever.

Finally, yesterday(Thurs) was the day we were scheduled to leave. Our flight left at 8pm so we had all day to walk around Palermo. We had to check out of our hotel by 11 but they let us keep our bags there so we could walk around. We wandered around all day, sweating, feet hurting and wondering what there was to see there (not much that we could get to). We were searching for a post office to buy some stamps and we came upon the largest post office I've ever seen. It looked like a capital building or something. We ask the fellow (through a woman who is helping us translate) if we can buy a few stamps. He says, looking very distressed, "Stamps? No, that is impossible today". uhhh, really ? Impossible? Is Thursday a no stamp day in Italy? Well, whatever , so he told us about a place( a tobacco shop) where we could buy them down the street. Hmm, thanks post office for referring us to a tobacco shop for your product...anyways, we go to the tobacco shop and the woman was rude and adamant that she had no stamps. This was starting to get ridiculous. We stopped at one more tobacco shop(that only had 60 cents worth of stamps) before finally finding a satellite post office where we were able to buy stamps. It was an ordeal.

We wandered around some more until we came to this beautiful Italian leather purse shop. Immediately I found the most beautiful, pink, Italian leather purse. and it was 50% off! Which isn't saying too much because it was still expensive and would've been the most expensive purse I ever bought. Dan wanted to get it but I wanted to think about it a little more because it was a lot of money. But how often do you get the chance to buy a real Italian leather purse...from ITALY?? so we decided we would come back later and buy it if I really wanted it. So later comes around and I decide that it's too great an opportunity to pass up. By this time we are very hot and miserable and can barely walk because our feet hurt from walking for the past 4 hours. We were quite a ways from the shop but I decided it was worth the effort. We made it back to the shop, only to discover it closed. I should explain that in Italy (or at least Sicily for sure), everything closes from 1-4ish except for bars, cafe's and a few random shops. Everyone goes home for lunch. We had not counted on this(even though we had been encountering this annoying problem all week). I was super bummed because we could not wait around for the shop to open because we had to catch the bus to the airport. Oh well, maybe next time.

Now that this post is crazy long, I will save the actual getting home story for my next post. Enjoy the pics! There are a lot of them!! Remember, double click on them to enlarge them