The Never Ending Journey

We arrived back in Palermo around 7pm Friday night and said farewell to our fellow travellers, although we saw several of them the following day. Most were heading to other destinations, Malta, Sardinia, Naples, Rome, Milan, Norway, England and beyond.  Saturday we toured the Museo Archeologica where several displays featured elements from the various ruins we had seen on our tour.  Our tour company provided us with a private transfer to our hotel in Cenisi as a way of compensating us for some inconveniences we experienced. That was far better than the 1 bus/ 2 trains option that we would have done on our own.  The town seemed close to dead when we arrived at 2:30 but a quick walk at 6:30 shows a town risen from the dead. All the shops and cafes are open and the local people are  sitting outside of the various businesses enjoying the cooler evening air. The sound of kids screaming, yelling and having fun is drowning out the angry horns of impatient drivers. The ma...

Our final stop on the tour following Selinunte was the town of Marsala on the western coast of Sicily, famous for the wine of the same name.     Our visit to the Pellegrino Winery was one of the most comprehensive we have ever undertaken. The guide spoke perfect English and her knowledge of the craft was extensive. Marsala is much more than the generic plonk they sellin Canada as a cooking wine. Like port it is a wine product fortified with brandy. The brandy is made from the same wine. Available in 3 different styles it is aged and blended using different aging processes. It ranges in colour and age, the youngest being similar in taste and sweetness to Canadian ice wine.  A darker variety that we sampled was aged almost 19 years. The final sample was somewhat darker and sweeter and of slightly higher alcohol content. Due to it’s limited production it is not shipped to other counties but is only available in Italy.

The sunset turned the sky a stunning blood red just above the horizon as our bus crawled through the outskirts of Modica, the last town before Ragusa, our final stop for the night.  The traffic finally thinned out on the west side of town but progress still remained slow due to the darkness coupled with the narrowness of the road and it’s frequent S bends.    We arrived in Ragusa at around 8:00, just under 12 hours since our journey started.    Leaving Catania at 8:30am, our first stop was the Archeological Park Of Syracuse, a town of  about 125,000 inhabitants. It is located on the East coast, roughly 60km south of Catania.  The main features of the park were a quarry where captured prisoners from the war between Syracuse and Athens in 413 BC were forced into slavery mining limestone for the construction of the city.  The other key site is an ancient amphitheater, the Greek Theatre from 5th century BC. Used for performances of Greek tra...

Saturday Sept 28th    We are now in Cinisi (pronounced ChinEC) a little shithole of a town adjacent to the airport in preparation for our 9am flight to Milan.  The B&B seems to have internet that is running at the speed of sound compared to every other hotel on our trip, so I’ll try to do a quick recap of the last 3 days.     The town of Modica Was more or less a waste of time- a chocolate tasting and a visit to the Cathedral (Duomo di San Pietro in upper Modica.    From there we covered 2 major archaeological sites. The first, Valley of Temples  nesr Agrigento on the south coast and the second, the following morning, Selinunte, some 60 km to the west.  We reached the former at 6pm, at least an hour later than planned due to the driver’s inability to figure out the shortest route. Almost 1.4 km in length the walking path took us by various ruins, some in better shape than others.  The most intact ruin here was the Temple o...

Today might be Tuesday, or Not! I’ve sorta lost track of days since this trip started.   This will be our third night staying in Catania but we have actually seen nothing of the town as all our excursions were to neighbouring towns and cities and we rarely got back to the hotel before 7:30pm.  After three days I’m convinced our bus driver was a total idiot or a subtle genius. He managed to take incorrect routes at least twice per day. His GPS was a rather ancient TomTom which steered him, either accidentally or deliberately, down roads that made absolutely no sense. I’m almost convinced he may have been paid by the km. and was padding his logbook accordingly. At this time it doesn’t really matter as we start afresh tomorrow with a different bus and driver.   Monday morning our journey took us inland about 140km to a Roman Villa located outside the town of Piazza Armerina. Believed to have been built around 300 AD it was buried by several landslides and was not discover...

Sunday afternoon, following lunch in Palermo, our group headed approx. 45km east along the northern coast to the small town of Cefalu. Our bus parked at the edge of town as the streets were too narrow to accommodate anything bigger than a minivan. The main purpose of the trip was to see the Cathedral. Built in the 12th century, it is considered one of the highlights of Sicily. Strangely enough it’s interior is largely unfinished but what is completed is quite spectacular. The apse and transepts  (top and arms of the cross) featured what appeared at first glance to be frescoes but are, in fact mosaics. The largest of which featured Christ holding a bible. Below that is a second mosaic of the Virgin Mary surrounded by four Archangels.  The walls of the apse featured several carvings as did the walls of the transepts but beyond that the walls of the nave were simply plastered. (And maybe the guy doing all the work was too, possibly explaining why the job never got finished!!!🤦...

Just for a change I’ll review the day backwards. After a rather long day which started with a short tour of Palermo to see stuff we had mostly seen on our own on Friday and Saturday,  our bus pulled into Catania and I was feeling half past dead! Oops, wrong song.🙄  I had already book marked the location of our hotel and was tracking the driver’s route on my phone. It was almost 8pm. An hour later than our planned arrival which was delayed due to various issues, a late departure from Cefalù, unplanned bathroom breaks and road con or should that be road DEstruction.  For some strange reason the driver veered off the most logical route and began to loop back into the old city. He eventually found himself at a T junction of a rather narrow street and found the bus was too big to make the required left hand turn. After attempting the manoeuvre for a good 15 minutes, pissing off several locals who had the option of moving their parked cars or having them crushed he decided...

The breakfast room was full and most of the food trays empty when we arrived at 8:15am. A large tour group was just leaving and the staff were probably cheering their departure. It appears that one of the group had taken a glass of juice from one of the juice dispensers but failed to turn off the tap afterwards. Juice was flowing into the catch basin and all over the table  beneath it, soaking all the adjacent glassware and pouring onto the floor 🙄🙄. Naturally any requests for cappuccino etc. were on hold till they cleaned up the mess. So breakfast took a little longer than planned, but we still managed to make it to the city centre by 9:30.   We spent the morning touring a couple of churches, the other 2 markets as well as a monastery. Susanna took a rain check on the latter since it involved a hike up several flights of stairs leading up to  a rooftop walkway several stories up. I managed to take some great photos of the surrounding city and the adjacent waterfront. ...

if the video doesn’t work, it is also posted on my Facebook page for those that have access to both. I’m still experimenting at this point and am unsure if the fault is this ap. itself or the internet speeds here in the hotel

the alarm in my head woke me at around 8 but by the time we had the leisurely breakfast supplied by the hotel, we were too stuffed to handle an early start. Rosemary ham, grilled mushrooms and tomatoes, boiled eggs, several mixed juices, cheese, fresh fruit, cappuccino provided enough calories to get us moving.  We took a local bus south to the lower end of the Historical District before heading west through narrow side streets to arrive at the  sprawling Ballaro market area. I was able to give my Smooth Q gimbal a test run with my iPhone 7 plus  This device allows hand held video on the go with virtually no camera shake.  Following our trip through the market we set off to explore one church and came to an even better one part way through the journey. The Church Gesu, also known as the Complex of Casa Professa was a Baroque style church, dating back almost 500 years. Featuring hundreds of marble statues, a few examples shown below  The church has upwards ...

We did end up taking a power nap before setting out in search of dinner. The weather forecast promised rain, but it held off for the duration of the evening. A walk around the area south of the hotel, along and just off the main drag ( Via della Liberta) shows a range of retail shops from lowly non descriptive dress shops to high end fashion brands like Dolce and Gabbana. Along the adjacent side streets were small cafes, restaurants, trattoria, pizza places etc. Missing were the obvious monuments to American kitsch like Starbucks, Burger King, etc  We opted for dinner at a local joint DaDiego, reached by a narrow set of steps descending into a basement that revealed a fairly large restaurant which seemed to be occupied by mostly locals.  While this is usually a good sign, this was not the case tonight.    Around us diners were indulging in large plates of pasta and pizza so we were hoping for the best. Deciding the pizzas were a little to large to tackle we start...

Well, here I am in Palermo waiting for my turn to jump in the shower and scrape off a layer of road grime!  The overnight flight from Toronto to Rome afforded me very little sleep thanks to the baby three rows ahead who seemed to want the attention of the entire plane. Adding to the irritation of him screaming was his mother’s continual “Sh,sh, sh, sh”as she tried to quiet him down ( Imagine a steam locomotive getting ready to leave the station)🤦‍♂️   The flight was a little under 9 hours and due to a late departure it landed in Rome a good 40 minutes late. That left us 16 minutes to go from one terminal to another ( about 1.2km) before the gates closed for the Rome to Palermo leg. Signage informed us that it was a 14 minute “walk” so we booted it as fast as our old foggey legs could carry us, arriving at the gate with about 2 minutes to spare. That also included a stop to clear customs so, to say the least, it was a tad stressful.  Customs was fully automated with a ...

Today, the 9th of September, marks what would have been my Dear Mother's 90th Birthday. She passed away in 2001 a scant 2 weeks before the World Trade Towers collapsed.   I imagine she would be shaking her head in disgust at the shape of the world today, especially the Brexit Mess and the Court Jester running, or should that be ruining the WhiteHouse.   It is also just over 2 weeks since I ( unofficially) retired from the Profession of Pharmacy.   After 45 years in the business, I think I have earned my rest.  I'm not actually surrendering my license until the year end, just in case some emergency crops up and someone requires my services.    As I look back over my previous entries and I look at the current state of affairs in Hong Kong, it appears we couldn't have timed that trip any better. There was no sign of any unrest at any time during our trip. I just feel sorry for the older middle and lower class citizens who's lives are being disrupted by ev...

During a visit to a recent hotel , which I won’t name at this point got an 8.1 on booking.com and a 3.5 out of 5 on TripAdvisor.   Now that I have seen it, I sure as hell wouldn’t give the place anything more than a 50% rating on either site. And if one looks at the balance of positive to negative reviews, both sites must use some kind of seriously screwed up allagorism to come up with such relatively high ratings.  I have often questioned how trip advisor comes up with their scores. And while they and other sites claim they verify their reviews, I do not believe that to be the case. While it is hard to impact on hotels that get thousands of reviews, smaller places can be made or broken by just a handful of fake reviews. How does one spot the fakes? The number one giveaway is that the poster has only one or two reviews to their credit. A single positive review will often indicate some type of inducement from the establishment. A single negative review may be an attack from ...