Fern e Mike a Palermo – 1 September 2013

Saluti da Palermo. September 1, 2013 (midnight in Italia)

As many of you know we make an annual summer trip to Europe to visit Mike’s brother and sister-in-law who live in Geneva and France. It’s not our complex trip which happens in December (wait til you hear our plans for this coming December)… The location for the visit has changed in recent years with only rare meet-ups in either of the cities in which they live. This year we meet in Rome. It’s always a short trip — 3 or 4 days together, and Mike and I generally add on a few days in another place to make the trip about 7 or 8 days.. (sometimes about 10 if we can link onto an American holiday). We often also catch up with Mike’s nieces who live in Geneva and London.

Anyway for all of you who have gotten these daily missives over the years, this should be a fairly calm trip – nothing exotic planned (or at least that’s what we think).. nowhere near the chaotic and challenging December trips (so these notes might be really boring– if so, feel free to toss!).. But still, since so many of you seem to enjoy hearing our travel notes, I’m documenting this one as I have in the last decade or so — with a daily email. (By the way, there really is a blog site that has about 300 of the daily reports from countries as far flung as Honduras, Tunisia, China, Morocco, Iceland, Panama, Estonia, etc. etc. — it’s not really launched because of the tens of thousands of images from these places, I haven’t yet been able to decide which to post to complement the stories. But in my spare time.. this too will happen.)

So now.. short and sweet –

We took a taxi to West Oakland BART and then BART to SFO (for those of you not in the Bay Area — the Bay Bridge is down as the new one opens on Tuesday; construction of the east span linking to the west span is taking place this weekend and demolition of the old bridge is happening too which was pretty uneventful and quite efficient once the crowds thinned out around Civic Center.

We lucked out at the very last minute and were upgraded to Business Class (which even with my two-million-miler status has not been a sure thing since United’s merger with Continental) — the flight was also uneventful (except that every single seat was taken). Arrived on time in Frankfurt, quickly changed planes to head to Palermo (which is where we will be for 5 days before we meet Mike’s brother in Rome). Naturally we couldn’t take our American-size carry-on rollies on the second flight so we checked them at the foot of the stairs to the plane… after carrying them down and up several flights to reach the plane (jetways in Europe are not all that common except for large planes). No matter how frequently we travel overseas, we always forget to check bags since we are so accustomed to carrying everything on and then being able to dash right out of the airport, bypassing the baggage section.

Arrived at the Hotel Excelsior which is a bit tired and could use a little bit of attention, but otherwise fine, and we think fairly well located. We’d been up about 27 hours by the time we got here (at 7:30 pm)… checked in, showered, put stuff away — and then walked about 5 blocks to a small ristorante recommended by the hotel… I think it was called Le Volte. Food was fine.. we couldn’t really read the menu and it was a local place so no translated versions.. but we did fine (especially since we are big devotees of Italian food) except for those parts of the menu that were very descriptive and who knows what that said…

We over-ate (but no dessert) — clams and muscle appetizer; pasta with tomatoes, eggplant and clams, eggplant tart, and veal with asparagus and mushrooms — and then headed back to the hotel (now awake for about 32 hours). We didn’t do too much planning or reading up on Palermo, given that we were both working up until the last minute before departure and even some work time on the flight… so we’ll wing it and see where it takes us. Supposedly this is a post-Mafia period for Sicily — with repaired streets, renovated buildings, and businesses that have pledged not to pay Mafia protection fees.

Most likely we’ll just walk the streets tomorrow — assessing the scene; hopefully it will be a bit overcast which would make it less hot than what the typical temperature is. Tonight when we walked to the restaurant there was a nice breeze and the temperature was probably high 70s.

Take care

Happy Labor Day-

Buonanotte.. Tutto e buono

Fern