On to Catania
What a difference. Alitalia is a bureaucratic, miserable excuse for an airline. It is overstaffed with people that could have come right out of the worst government agency with their civil service attitudes. There was an inexplicable delay, for instance, and nobody ever bothered to explain when we were going to leave or why the delay was taking place. We finally boarded a ratty disheveled MD-82 and settled into our seats that make Southwest look roomy. Fortunately the flight wasn't full so it could have been worse, and we made a safe journey over the gleaming Mediterranean and landed in Catania. They offered us a towelette in foil, horrible "pizza flavor" crackers, and some cookies that my wife said were actually good.

When we landed we deplaned through the tail door while the jets were still making noise. It was awful, the first time I've ever done that and hopefully the last.

Catania airport is basically a big baggage claim room that is hot, smelly, crowded and uncomfortable. Police are posted at the doors, keeping people from entering the baggage claim area. I had to use the bathroom but didn't want to risk leaving and not being able to reenter so I waited.

Our bags came quickly and we walked through to the little rental car window. We had reserved with Maggiore for 10 days and had paid already, but of course they insisted that there is an additional bit of insurance that was not included. We ended up paying more (even though we had paid for insurance and collision damage waivers when we had reserved the car in the US).

The rental car gentlemen locked his little office and led us through, outside, and to our car, which was a nice touch. The car was a low mileage Opel Vectra with a 1800cc engine, manual transmission, and very comfortable interior, a class F rental.

There are two "big" cities in Sicily - Palermo is the biggest, with Catania being much smaller but still much bigger than every other town in Sicily. We didn't spend much time in Catania, nor did we want to. Palermo had some charm but we didn't feel that Catania did.


Uh Oh! Or how I learned to drive Italian style

Theoretically, we only had to drive about 30 km to Taormina, our first stop, from Catania, and this should have been very easy. But there was coping with the Italian scooters, cars going around ours, people honking at us. Driving in Italy is very different. People may or may not respect traffic lights. They may drive on the sidewalk. It stressed me out because it seemed like a series of near misses and near-death experiences constantly.

And we didn't understand the signs. We missed the Autostrada entrance and spent several hours trying to figure out how to get back to where we wanted to go. What took us a few days to figure out is that in Italy, an arrow points left, say, meaning straight ahead. In the US, the arrow would point up, but they don't do things like that in Italy, so we naturally would take the left turn in this case and end up in the wrong road. And so forth.

Then on the autostradas, you drive always in the right lane except when passing. I didn't understand this until hours later it got into my dense head. Meanwhile, people whizzed by at 140km/hour, or honked incessantly at me. So what you are supposed to do is stay in the right lane and go into the left just to pass some recalcitrant vehicle. Trouble is you'll be barreling along at 140km/hour in the right lane and then almost run over some Piaggio. A Piaggio is basically a three wheeled motorcycle with a little truckbed on the back. It is really s-l-u-g-g-i-s-h and if you were to run over one you probably wouldn't know it. There are a lot of them in Sicily.

At this point, we had been awake for umpteen number of hours and we kept getting on the wrong road, circling back, ending up on roads we knew weren't right, fighting off the motorscooters that swarmed around us…

Finally we made it to Taormina, hours later, and then tried to find our hotel. We thought it was high up. Taormina is a mountain village that you access either by one narrow, narrow road, or by "tram". So we wound our way up, up, up, on the narrow road so thin that two vehicles (even Piaggios) couldn't pass without serious damage. We climbed. And climbed. And then a dead end. We were at a mountain village very high up, higher than Taormina. So we headed down again. And it was already 5:00pm local time. We had started our day in Northern Virginia and were on this maddeningly narrow dangerous mountain road. Up and down we went. Our maps were somewhere in our luggage in the trunk (great planning!). We kept asking directions and heard new Italian words. Here is a sample of the dialog:
Dove l'hotel Capotaormina, Senore?
[answer in a great swarm of unintelligible Italian]
Gratie, Senore

Then we'd proceed according to the unintelligible (to us) directions, going from one person to another like a billiard ball randomly bouncing around the pool table eventually, by chance, to land in a pocket.

And so forth. Finally, we found the hotel at the bottom of the hill, not far from the Ionian sea.

--to be continued