Sicily...in summary.

Taking the overnight ferry (with car) through the Straights of Messina.

Sunrise at the "toe" of Italy.

Our first glimpses of Mt Etna and Sicily.

I quickly became overwhelmed with the task of blogging from our vacation.  There was just too much fun to be had to stop and write about it.  Now I find myself in a position where I am writing one blog covering the span of about two weeks when each day of our trip really deserves its own description.

Overall, the trip was simply awesome.  I imagine it’ll be one of those trips we’ll reflect on for the rest of our lives.  I hope the kids remember something about it, anything about it.  If not, the 1,000 or so pictures we took may help to tell the story for them one day.

Lord where to start…ok, let’s start with some overall impressions.

First, for the record, one of my most favorite things to do in this life is to go swimming, long open-water swims, in the salty clear-blue water along the Mediterranean coast.  Quiet, peaceful, no current to speak of, no time constraints, warm sun, gentle waves (most of the time), extra buoyant because of the high salinity, clean water, swimming far away from the shore, just swimming until the swimming is done.  Won-der-ful!

Second, we ate well the whole vacation.  I’d say our meals ranged from “good” to “really damn good!”  Really good wine too.  The Nero d’Avola wine, famous in Sicily, is tasty and not expensive.  As a matter of fact, everything in Sicily was either inexpensive or at least reasonable.

 

Sicily is a really interesting place in that for all its beautiful landscape, amazing ruins, incredible beaches, and utter charm, it is largely unmaintained to the point of being really dirty and run-down in a lot of areas.  We were there in what is still considered the “off season”, but for being early June it still felt like a lot of places were like ghost towns.  We drove through many little towns that looked completely abandoned; little seaside towns lost in time, where there may be 6 or 10 houses that looked as if they hadn’t been lived-in or even touched in many years, another few houses that were in various stages of halted construction or demolition, then every so often a really nice looking place with a manicured lawn and garden tucked behind a series of walls, gates, or shrubs.  Suzanne commented that it often reminded her of rural Mexico.

Our children have become world-class travelers.  For being 6 and 5 years old, they are perfectly comfortable hopping on and off planes, ferries, buses, trollies, gondolas, fernunculars, cabs, water taxis, trains, or driving long distances in the car.  They walk through crushing crowds in tourist centers, scale ridiculously steep and narrow steps up a variety of churches and castles, hike along treacherous trails with side slopes that plunge hundreds of feet into the sea, swim in icicle-cold mountain lakes or in crystal-clear blue seas, ski in the Alps, wait in oppressive lines or race to catch our next mode of transportation.  Josh has become our go-to guy for repeating “No grazie” over and over and over to all of the African salesmen who often inundate us on the beaches with offers to give us the “best price” on towels, earrings, wood carvings, sunglasses, and a hundred other trinkets.  Isabel loves to look at maps and figure out where we are and where we should go.  Both of them strap on their backpacks and pull their own suitcases, hauling luggage up and down stairs “BY MY-SELF!!!” 

From where we sat at dinner on our first night in Giardini Naxos.

And do they walk!  I mean, we do some serious walking, and they walk!  I distinctly remember our first couple of trips in the first weeks we arrived in Italy.  Ho-ly-canoli did I spend some time walking through Venice and Salzburg with one of the two kids on my back piggy-back style.  But once they built up some stamina and learned what the expectations were, they’ve been some walking fools ever since.

Well, not only does that not cover our experience in Sicily, it doesn’t even scratch the surface.  I must find a way to come back to this trip for our blog and describe some more about the sights, sounds, places, people, and wonderful experiences.  But for now we’re moving on because there are too many other things to go do and see and experience, and the writing-about-it part will just have to take a back seat. 

In the public gardens of Taormina.

I caught Isabel enjoying some quiet time sitting on the ruins of the amphitheatre in Taormina.

Josh doing his best King Arthur routine.

My hope is that these experiences stay in our memories and in our hearts for the rest of our lives; a deep well of story-telling that we can draw from during family gatherings for decades; experiences we share together as a family and become part of our collective history.

Playing catch on the beach below Taormina.

ct

p.s. The pictures I’m posting on this blog are not necessarily the best we have of our trip or capture anywhere close to the entire experience.  Not by a long shot.  They aren’t even necessarily the best pictures of one DAY of the trip.  Most days, we took over 100 pictures.  Generally speaking, I have been sifting through one day’s worth of pictures per blog, try to pick a few from that day that catch my eye, and include them in the post.  I haven’t even bothered to sift through 500-600 pictures from our albums for inclusion in these blog postings.  It’ll have to do.  ct