To Mainland Italy
October 10
The ferry back to Sicily was also pleasant
except for another annoying American film comedy. We had booked a room at the
Hotel Villa Ada in Pozzallo. We were very pleased with our room as it was quite
large and very comfortable. It was also on the Piazza in the center of town and
a very nice restaurant was only a few hundred meters away. We had a very
enjoyable meal. Both of us had a lemon chicken, and we enjoyed chatting with the
manager who was a very gregarious man. I even managed to tell him (in Italian)
the joke about the Italian toast cin cin and how it is received in Japan.
October 11
Saturday morning we drove to Messina and caught
the noon ferry to Villa San Giovanni. I think we made the same mistake this year
that we did last year when trying to catch the ferry. We went to the wrong
terminal but everything worked out okay. We caught the ferry we had intended
and got back to the Italian mainland without incident. We drove for little while
and then got off the autostrada to look for lunch. We ended up in a small town
called Palmi where we found a pizzeria. We had a pleasant meal and were
surprised to find that the manager once lived in America and is a US citizen.
Messina
and Villa San Giovanni from the ferry
We've had some incidents with Mel’s credit card.
It seems that the stations that have a free-standing payment machine can't
process the card, so being able to fill up has been challenging. I was able to
fill the car at a station that used the little Wi-Fi card readers.
A hilltop
village seen along the autostrada
We spent the night in a very nice B and B in
Lamezia Terme. There really isn't much to do in that town, but it was a good
stopping point to break up the drive to Napoli. We had dinner at a nearby
restaurant and it was very good - even the house wine. There was a table of five
Americans and on their way out we learned that they were from Coeur d'Alene,
Idaho. Then when we left the restaurant there was another American couple from
Reston, Virginia. That was the most Americans we have encountered on this trip.
The Italians tend to eat a lot later than Americans, so the restaurant didn’t
begin to fill up until about 9:00. We were just finishing our meal when the
restaurant got busy – they waiter came along and cleared our table, a hint they
wanted the table free. We’ve never encountered this in Italy before.
We had an email from our Italian language
partner in San Severino Marche – he knew we were planning to go to Genova at the
tail end of our trip. He warned us about the flooding in that town. Hokey Smoke!
There had been 17” of rain in 24 hours – the town was a mess. The rain water had
flowed down the hills, sweeping cars along the way in to the piazza at the
bottom of the hill. We watched the news on TV and were amazed that there weren’t
more fatalities (apparently only one). There must have been 100 cars jumbled
together like toys in the piazza. The news reports showed crews shoveling up mud
into large trash containers. The whole city was covered. We decided to wait for
a few days to see how long it would take to clean out the mess before we decided
if we were going to change our reservations.
October 12
We had a pleasant breakfast at the B and B, then
headed to Napoli. About two hours into our drive we stopped for coffee and Mel
discovered that she had failed to give the innkeeper the keys to the room. She
called the innkeeper, who didn’t seem all that concerned about it, but she felt
terrible about causing such an inconvenience. |