Day 21 -A view of Mt. Etna - Does It Always Rain In Messina - A Quick Trip - Crank up the heat for the old man

A nice day in Taormina Sicily. Depoti had to lug his suitcase down 63 steps to avoid lugging it up 49 stairs. We hit the autostrade by 9. Let me explain. The Hotel Villa Greta is built on a hillside. No elevator. 26 rooms spread over 50 or 60 vertical feet. Lots of steep stairs. Nice views and some nice rooms with verandas. Rated 2 stars, but I'm not so sure. The shower was a joke, the beds five foot ten inches long and the TV had rabbit ears. But really nice views.

Here's the view of Etna from our hotel.

And looking down towards Naxos this morning.

Of course it's raining in Messina. Been in Sicily four days, two trips to Messina and it's raining both times. 10 minute wait for the ferrly and if only we'd had our cameras ready we'd have proof for you of the Italians love of litter.

We're sitting in line when the lady comes off the ferry. Walks over in the direction of our car. Three dogs, really happy to see her, trot up and she pets them then proceeds to dump a plastic sack of goodies on the sidewalk for these dogs. Then what does she do?? Of course, she takes the plastic bag and tosses it into the sea. We just about died laughing. What's up with that??

Here's a couple shots of Messina. Oh, look, now that we're leaving, it's clearing up..

Very foggy in Italy on our return, after two and a half nice days in Sicily, and we were a bit disappointed. However, it's the only time we've seen Italians drive slow on the Autostrade.

Got back at about noon and found that Cristian had shuttered the place up and turned the heat completely off. So I had to crank it up for Mr. Thin Blood.  We picked up supplies and had a nice lunch of,... come on you can recite the list by heart by now (bread, sausage, cheese and wine), listened to some blues music talked about how the world of MP3's has passed Depoti by. I have made it my personal quest to rectify that.

I then got the brilliant idea to get Mr.Depoti his own email account and Facebook page (EMERGENCY!!! HE NEEDS FRIENDS!!! QUICK. FRIEND GIRARD DEPOTI EMERGENCY!!!  Email him at Salami1949@gmail.com).

(This has been a public service announcement. Had it been a real emergency, I would have used BOLD).

Sent some messages to two Randy "Radar" Zellers on Facebook in hopes that one of them might have been our roommate in Turkey in 1970 and now are bored to tears. No traffic jams, triple parking, white lining motorcycles. Boring.

So once again, it's Ciao for Now.