On the Road to Catania

Sunday, 15 October 2017 
Sunday morning we expected the roads would be nice and easy since there was virtually no one around on Saturday despite the beautiful blue skies and a gorgeous volcano to explore. Boy, were we wrong. Sunday morning, 10:00am and bumper to bumper traffic coming up the mountain (we were going down so at least we were against the traffic) but those Italians are crazy. Cars parked on both sides of the road, through tiny towns, I'm freaking out because Trevor is so close to the parked cars on the right that we hit one with our mirror at one point (totally freaked me out he was going to take out our mirror) and totally freaked out he was going to come up on the footpath and take out a tyre. Meantime, Trevor is totally freaked out that he's going to hit an oncoming car that is missing him by millimetres. Well, the inevitable happened - hit the curb and the tyre went splat.

Lucky Trevor knows how to change a tyre. Took 20 minutes. 10 minutes of that was working out the bits and pieces in the tyre/jack kit. Then into the next major town which is called Catania, and never thought driving at 20kph could be so stressful. In that town, it seemed that about 25% of cars had their side mirrors smashed. Another 30% had their side mirrors pushed in (they are designed so that you can push them almost flat against the car) and the rest waiting to be smashed. Lots of scratched sides of cars, lots of scratched sides of buildings - and that's the locals - imagine how freaked out we were.

Catania - what a history! It was founded as a Greek colony around the 8th century BCE. Then they were taken over the Romans in the 3rd century BCE. After the Romans, it was sacked by the Vandals, subsequently ruled by the Ostrogoths, the Eastern Roman Empire, then the Moslems, then the Normans, then the Germans, then the French and then the Spanish. Phew!

Settled in for the afternoon at a famous Catania wine bar. Food was exceptionally inexpensive and really delicious. The problem was that the wine didn’t arrive until after we’d eaten the food. And they got the order wrong. At a wine bar. Disappointment.

This was our hotel room in Catania. 

Isn’t it grand?

Off to the Catania market. It is touted as one of the things to see in Catania. It was good, but we thought Palermo market was better.