Goodbye Sicily

February 23, 2019

I awoke at 3 something to the sound of thunder. It sounded like the rain had found us on our last day. I fell back asleep for a couple of more hours, but we were soon up to start getting ready for our final hours in Sicily.

We left the AirBnB at check-out time of 10:00 and got into the Pandamobile. It was drizzling so we decided to drive the 10-15 minutes to the city of Castelmola which was higher in elevation than Taormina and supposed to offer fabulous views. As we got closer it started to sleet/snow. I guess we really had been lucky with the weather that we had. Tom said the rain reminded him of how we ended our Iceland trip, which the last day also rained. He says it’s the country crying that we are leaving.

Castelmola was not crowded at all, in fact it was practically vacant. We found street parking and wandered the streets until we got to a square with a church and space open enough to catch the view of Mt. Etna. Unfortunately being cloudy and rainy/snowy it was not the best. We found a restaurant and hopped in to have brunch. Tom and I both had a ham, cheese, tomato sandwich. His was on toast and mine was on some other type of bread. We each had a hot chocolate, but this hot chocolate was not like any hot chocolate either one of us has had before. It was more like the consistency of pudding. It was good, but unfortunately there was bits of coconut in it which I of course despise. It’s not the taste, it’s those itty bitty gritty pieces that I can feel while eating. I had a couple of bites and let Tom have the rest.

We left the restaraunt and wandered the streets to see if any stores were open for any last minute souvenir shopping. Unfortunately only a couple of stores were open and they did not have what I was looking for. Once again I get to kick myself for not buying a Christmas ornament when I saw it a few days back. I’m hoping that maybe the airport will be able to offer me what I’m looking for.

We attempted to track down one last geocache, but the GPS was bounching and being that the streets are very zig zagged and not in a grid pattern what-so-ever, and that it was cold, windy, and rainy I gave up before we even got close. Not worth it.

It was only 11:45, but with the weather being what it was, we decided to just go to the airport for our 4:15 flight. It was an hour drive and I was happy to have the extra time to find the rental car drop off location. The signs were not well marked and it took a few tries before we found it, but we eventually did. The rental car guys checked out the car gave us the ok and we were on our way to the terminal. Unfortuantely it was still raining and we had to walk from the car rental drop off to the terminal. It wasn’t terribly far, but far enough that our bags got pretty wet. So glad this wasn’t the weather we had all week.

Check-in and security were no problem and we were soon relaxing in the gate area. There were a few stores and places for food so I checked them out. I didn’t find a Christmas ornament that I liked, but I did find a Sicilian deep fried food (I forget what it’s called) that we had not yet tried. This particular one had rice and a tomato sauce inside. It was very good. Maybe I will find an ornament in the Milan airport tomorrow.

We had a smooth flight and landed a couple of minutes early. As we waited for our baggage we called our hotel and arranged for our free shuttle. Unfortunately we missed the first pass as it took a little longer then expected for the luggage to arrive. We just had to wait an extra half hour and we were on the way to the hotel. The hotel I picked from Hotels.com is excellent. Nice room and great service and not that expensive. They have offered to prepare a boxed breakfast for us since we have to leave so early in the morning. We ate dinner at the restaraunt in the hotel and had some excellent pizza. It was super busy and was probably the fastest service we had. We were in and out in an hour, which was good for us since we needed to get to bed.