Hello my peoples, from the breathtakingly beautiful... Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta. OK, so breathtakingly beautiful may be stretching it, but I have an hour or so to kill before I board the plane to Rome, so I thought I'd fill you in on my itinerary.
We're flying into Rome, and connecting to Catania on the island of Sicily. Our first hotel in Sicily is in the resort town of Taormina. It has a pool, which is nice, but not much room around the pool deck because of some silly cliff.
Still, we'll do our best to get by and relax after our long flights.
Wednesday will bring a day trip to Syracuse, which has to be nicer than the one in the United States. We'll return to Taormina that night and try not to fall off the cliffs.
Thursday afternoon, we head for Agrigento, which I'm told also has a lot of old Sicilian stuff.
Saturday, we're headed for Palermo where we'll stay until Monday, when we fly back to Rome. The remainder of the trip will be spent in and around Rome and The Vatican, with a day trip to Assissi next Thursday. Then I'll be heading back to the states on Saturday the 13th.
As some of you probably read, I bought a condo recently, and as a result, I have done little to no research on Italy, Sicily, food, money, common customs, the Italian language or any of those other things that can be helpful from time to time when travelling abroad.
Luckily it's a group tour organized by my church and led by a priest (Catholicism rocks) who went to seminary in Rome. He knows the language, the places to go, how to avoid angering people with hand gestures that are not considered offensive in the U.S. and, well he knows a lot about just about everything.
Having him on the trip will make it a totally different experience from going it alone. I'll be seeing everything with fresh eyes, but still learn the backstory as it were. Hopefully I'll be more dilligent about recording those tidbits here for you, but also for myself a few years down the road when European cities blend together and you can't remember exactly what happened on the other side of the pond.
I also got a new camera, so I'll hopefully be able to post a plethora of pictures. That's it, time to board. See you on the other side.