The photo of the platter above is the very one referred to in the following paragraphs.
As a bit of background information, the trip to Sicily was planned and paid for by Hewlett Packard Company. We were excited and grateful for the chance to go, and although the events that I record in my journal may sound less than appreciated, I have many reasons to be grateful to HP. Steve worked for them for many years, and started his business with his partner, Paul, as a result of Hewlett Packard selling their manufacturing software to Steve and Paul. I have always been so grateful for HP, except perhaps, for their lack of planning on this particular trip.
As a bit of background information, the trip to Sicily was planned and paid for by Hewlett Packard Company. We were excited and grateful for the chance to go, and although the events that I record in my journal may sound less than appreciated, I have many reasons to be grateful to HP. Steve worked for them for many years, and started his business with his partner, Paul, as a result of Hewlett Packard selling their manufacturing software to Steve and Paul. I have always been so grateful for HP, except perhaps, for their lack of planning on this particular trip.
Sicily
Flying in coach class is just fine normally, but for 16 or 17 hours, it can be extremely uncomfortable! We flew through New York, then Milan, and finally made it to Sicily completely exhausted. We thought things would be just fine once we got to the hotel, but our assurance that “one bus leaves the airport every 15 minutes” turned into an hour long wait (to save the event operators money, I suppose). I think Hewlett Packard’s coordinators paid a flat rate for a company in Sicily to manage all our bussing and touring, and they cut corners everywhere they possibly could. The packets of information that told us what the schedules would be for each days events didn’t make it to our rooms until the third day (why bother?). The map of the area explaining local history and points of interest was all in Italian.
The trip from the airport to the hotel was not long, but very telling. There are buildings all over the beautiful hills along this island’s eastern coastline that have been abandoned and left for nature to take over. Building projects have been started and never finished. I learned later that this was due to the fact that the volcano is so active that the ground is constantly moving. Building permits were granted in seismically active places where there never should have been any building attempted. There was garbage everywhere in the streets. Graffiti was prevalent, as bad in some places as I’ve seen in Los Angeles. The drivers are almost as scary as those in Paris, with less to lose. Every car seemed to proudly show off its dents, as if they were badges of courage. Perhaps it was futile to repair them.
There were places along the roadside that had been used as dump sites, with old couches, washing machines and refrigerators slowly being covered up by plants trying to grow over and around them. Beautiful groves of lemon trees were being smothered by vines, with undergrowth so thick it reached the lower branches of the trees, which, even in these conditions, continued to put forth bountiful crops.
Our hotel’s name was much grander than what it delivered. It was called the Excelsior Palace. We had one of the rooms with a nice view, and that was a glimpse of the sea through a gap between two apartment buildings with wash hanging from the balconies. This view was quaint, but not what I had expected to see from our hotel room. Our bed was rock hard. I actually liked it’s firmness, but if I turned onto my side, my arms would fall asleep from the lack of circulation. Our room was okay, just not anything more than a Motel 6 would have to offer. The best part of the stay there was the blood orange juice served at breakfast every morning.
Sunday, we were to take a bus tour to Mount Etna (an active volcano) but after 3 hours in the bus, they told us they had to cancel the trip up the mountain because it was raining and had snowed at the higher elevations. I was shocked. I hadn't expected snow in southern Italy! It seemed unreal. We took the tour bus all right, but didn’t see anything – just spent several hours driving around as a captive audience, while the bus drove in circles. The lead driver was lost, and all 7 of the other bus drivers kept following him. At one point, the lead bus stopped on the side of a little residential street. No one seemed to know the reason, but eventually, our hostess told us that someone in the lead bus needed to use the restroom. She told us that if we needed to do the same, that we should go now.
I decided that I should probably go while the buses were stopped, as they had not readied the restrooms on any of the buses and there may not be another opportunity for a while. I exited the bus and followed the stream of men and women who seemed to know where they were going. As we headed up hill the line turned into the dirt driveway of a residence. It continued into a woman's garage, and I could see her as she came out of the door through which a hundred or so people with muddy shoes were hoping to enter. She was shouting in Italian, "Mama Mia!" and several other words I didn't understand, all the while waving a rag in one hand and wielding a broom in the other. I then realized that she must be someone personally known to the lead bus driver, and he had stopped to let one emergency case off his bus. The poor lady must have been completely shocked at the popularity of her home. I turned around and went back to the bus. Many others did not.
Our hostess assured those of us who had come back without having used the restroom that we would be stopping in about a half hour. We figured we could hold out until then. As one hour came and went, then another, many people on the bus were ready to revolt. We were captives with full bladders - not a good combination. We finally stopped at a defunct winery with several port-a-potties set up for our use. None of them had toilet paper. I was so glad I had a packet of tissues in my purse! They served up an outdoor lunch in the rain at the winery. We stood huddled under the shelter that was set up to serve the food under trying to eat some of the most inedible food I have ever seen in one place at time. It was not meant to be finger food, but there were no utensils provided. By the end of the luncheon the sun came out, and things started looking up.
We spouses went on a tour the next day to the little town of Taormina, and the sun shone all day. Such a drastic change from the day before, it was even too hot for a sweater. We had a lovely time touring the old Roman ruins and the beautiful vibrant town. I beleive that day was the only redeeming portion of the whole trip. The view of the sea from the picturesque hillside town was incredibly beautiful. Flowers were blooming everywhere, and the streets were clean and inviting. I spent the day with Josette Dorius (Steve’s partner’s wife), and Ann de Sutter (our partner’s wife from Belgium). We had lunch in a little outdoor café where the waiter was trying to be cute, and kept clicking his heels as though he were our slave, and we were three queens whose every wish was to be granted. We laughed all through lunch.
The following day, Steve was finished with seminars at about 1:00pm, so we had lunch together. Most of the other attendees checked out that day to go on to other cities, or home, but we couldn’t leave. You see, our travel agent had booked our flight to leave that day, with a connecting flight through Milan on the following day. That was wonderful, except she forgot to book a hotel room. When this was discovered, she checked all the hotels she could think of, and there was not a single room in all of Milan to put us in! We were forced to take a different airline out a day later, thus making the entire trip home in one day, instead of breaking it up a bit, as originally planned. We stayed one more night our hotel in Acireale (pronounced Aw-chi-dE-al-A).
So, on the day that most everyone left for home, Steve and I decided to take the train back to the town of Taormina, since he hadn’t been able to see it. We walked in the hot sun of the day until we reached the train station, where we were informed that we had just missed the train to Taormina. The ticket seller didn’t speak any English, but understood a bit of French, so he and Steve conversed in French, and it was determined that the next train to Taormina would leave the station in about 45 minutes. We sat on platform 2 and waited. We waited and waited and did some more waiting, and finally a bus (I'm not kidding, it was a bus!) came down the tracks. It was covered in graffiti. It was not our train, so we let it go by with a sigh of relief. Three seventeen pm came and went, still not a hint of our train. We kept checking the printed schedule, making sure we hadn’t misread it, and it hadn’t changed. Another bus covered in graffiti came down the tracks from the opposite direction, right on time. Still no 3:17 train. We just couldn’t figure it out.
I had consumed 2 cans of soda by this time, and needed to use the bathroom again, so while I was gone, Steve checked the schedule yet again. This time, he realized that the ticket seller had sold us a ticket for a train that only runs on holidays or other times of increased demand. The next reliable train wouldn’t come by for another hour, and even that one was questionable. The bus driver out in front of the train station told us that the next bus to the downtown area of Acireale (the town our hotel was in) would not be there for 40 minutes, and there were no taxi’s available.
We decided to walk back to the center of the little town. Acireale is on a hillside made from volcanic rock, and the walk to the center of town was not more than a few miles, but it was all uphill. There are many little steep gorges that separate sections of the town, so you have to walk around them, rather than in a straight line to the place you want to go, which increased the walking time by quite a bit. We were hot, tired, and irritable by the time we stopped for change at the local bank. The machine said it had been informed to return our card to us, and that we should call our bank. We tried again, with the same results. Knowing there was money in our account, we started worrying about why we would get such a strange message. We didn’t have much cash left, and would need some for the cab ride to the airport. We decided to ask about change at the hotel.
We stopped at two or three shops to look around, and bought the one thing I most wanted to bring home from Italy. A beautiful hand painted serving platter, about 16 inches across. It was so pretty, and just what I was hoping to find. The shop owner was a wood carver, who was in the middle of working on something big when we came in his shop. He didn’t speak any English (most people in the area of Catania, Acireale and Taormina do not speak English) but we were able to tell him what we wanted, and he wrapped up our treasure with care. I was satisfied, even with all the walking, that it had been worth it all, just to get this platter.
Because of our cash situation, Steve didn’t want to spend any of what we had on us. There are no public benches in the town (that we could see, anyway), and the only place to rest was on the chairs set out in front of the little cafes. Of course, they don’t want people stopping to rest on their chairs unless they intend to buy. I wasn’t walking another inch until I’d rested, no matter what money we had on hand, so I sat down. Steve finally realized I wasn’t going to leave until I’d had my rest, so when the waiter came to take our order, he ordered a few sodas.
By the time we walked back to our room that night, we were both too exhausted to eat dinner. We slept until about 9:30pm, then ordered room service.
The next morning we were up and packed and at the airport by 8:15. It was pouring rain, but the plane was still scheduled to take off on time, at 9:30. Our cab driver, who had quoted a price of 70,000 lire over the phone, now wanted 80,000 before he would leave. We gave him everything we had, which was about 78,000, but he went away unhappy, as did we.
Our travel agent, as I mentioned before, had booked our new flight out of Catania on a different airline, since the one we were originally booked on didn’t run a flight at that same time a day later. We took our Meridiana tickets to the counter of the AirEurope check in, as our agent had informed us we should do. We waited in line for about 20 minutes. When we got to the head of the line, they told us we would have to go and have our tickets approved by the AirEurope counter in the front of the airport. So we hauled our luggage back to the front of the airport, where we waited in another line. Finally getting to us, the girl took one of our tickets and walked over to three or four counters (including the one whose line we had just vacated) before coming back to tell us that we would have to wait for her management to decide if they would honor this ticket. We told her we would just buy another ticket, rather than wait, but she was insistent that we wait. When the verdict finally came down that AirEurope would not accept our flight coupons (because it was our fault we didn’t take the flight the day before) we were forced to buy two one way tickets to Milan in order to connect with our flight out of Italy as planned.
We paid the $350.00 fare, and followed the signs to the boarding gates, which took us directly to the gift shops, not the departure gates. I hadn’t found anything for my boys in the shops we’d been in, and thought that one particular shop would have just the right kind of thing to take home. They did, thank heavens, but when I went to pay for it, they didn’t take anything but cash. I had to leave the gifts behind, as there was no time to get change. We hurriedly located the departure gates, and gave them our tickets. They put us on a shuttle bus that took us about 10 yards (I'm not kidding) over to the waiting plane, and we boarded.
The flight was uneventful, even pleasant, with comfortable seats and friendly smiles from the flight attendants.
When we arrived in Milan, we were pinched for time, having only an hour before our connecting flight to New York was to leave. As we got off the shuttle bus from the plane, in our hurry to get checked in, we turned a corner, and the bag with our one and only treasure slipped and hit the floor. It sounded bad, but we didn’t have time to even look at it. We rushed through the corridors to the opposite end of the airport, where our check in counter was, then down the stairs to where the plane was almost ready to leave. We were two of the last 5 people to board. Unfortunately, when we landed in New York, and went to claim our luggage (to take it through customs) one of our bags had not made it on the plane – my bag.
We had a few hours in New York, so Steve took our tickets to the counter in Delta’s Crown Room where they gave us seats in an exit row. I asked Steve if he was sure they weren’t the kind that don’t recline, and he was quite sure they were not. By this time, our body clocks thought it was 10:30 at night. We’d had a very exhausting day, with a few more hours to wait before getting on yet another long flight, and I didn’t want to have to sit up through it. While we were waiting, Steve checked the damage to our platter, and found it was in four large pieces, with tiny fragments of varying sizes skipping around in the bottom of the bag. I wanted to cry by this time.
We got on the last plane of our trip, and sure enough, we were on an exit row, with SEATS THAT DON’T RECLINE! I was now laughing hysterically. It was just too much to believe. The seats on this plane have armrests that are wider than normal (thus narrowing the available seat room) and they don’t move. Having an oversized rump, they pinched at my hips the entire flight. I was never so happy to be back home as I was last night! It was around 10:30 when we arrived home, 24 hours after waking up the morning we left Sicily. My bag is still missing, but I'm so grateful to be here, that at this point, I don’t care. I don't believe I'll be going back to Sicily any time soon, if ever.
The trip from the airport to the hotel was not long, but very telling. There are buildings all over the beautiful hills along this island’s eastern coastline that have been abandoned and left for nature to take over. Building projects have been started and never finished. I learned later that this was due to the fact that the volcano is so active that the ground is constantly moving. Building permits were granted in seismically active places where there never should have been any building attempted. There was garbage everywhere in the streets. Graffiti was prevalent, as bad in some places as I’ve seen in Los Angeles. The drivers are almost as scary as those in Paris, with less to lose. Every car seemed to proudly show off its dents, as if they were badges of courage. Perhaps it was futile to repair them.
There were places along the roadside that had been used as dump sites, with old couches, washing machines and refrigerators slowly being covered up by plants trying to grow over and around them. Beautiful groves of lemon trees were being smothered by vines, with undergrowth so thick it reached the lower branches of the trees, which, even in these conditions, continued to put forth bountiful crops.
Our hotel’s name was much grander than what it delivered. It was called the Excelsior Palace. We had one of the rooms with a nice view, and that was a glimpse of the sea through a gap between two apartment buildings with wash hanging from the balconies. This view was quaint, but not what I had expected to see from our hotel room. Our bed was rock hard. I actually liked it’s firmness, but if I turned onto my side, my arms would fall asleep from the lack of circulation. Our room was okay, just not anything more than a Motel 6 would have to offer. The best part of the stay there was the blood orange juice served at breakfast every morning.
Sunday, we were to take a bus tour to Mount Etna (an active volcano) but after 3 hours in the bus, they told us they had to cancel the trip up the mountain because it was raining and had snowed at the higher elevations. I was shocked. I hadn't expected snow in southern Italy! It seemed unreal. We took the tour bus all right, but didn’t see anything – just spent several hours driving around as a captive audience, while the bus drove in circles. The lead driver was lost, and all 7 of the other bus drivers kept following him. At one point, the lead bus stopped on the side of a little residential street. No one seemed to know the reason, but eventually, our hostess told us that someone in the lead bus needed to use the restroom. She told us that if we needed to do the same, that we should go now.
I decided that I should probably go while the buses were stopped, as they had not readied the restrooms on any of the buses and there may not be another opportunity for a while. I exited the bus and followed the stream of men and women who seemed to know where they were going. As we headed up hill the line turned into the dirt driveway of a residence. It continued into a woman's garage, and I could see her as she came out of the door through which a hundred or so people with muddy shoes were hoping to enter. She was shouting in Italian, "Mama Mia!" and several other words I didn't understand, all the while waving a rag in one hand and wielding a broom in the other. I then realized that she must be someone personally known to the lead bus driver, and he had stopped to let one emergency case off his bus. The poor lady must have been completely shocked at the popularity of her home. I turned around and went back to the bus. Many others did not.
Our hostess assured those of us who had come back without having used the restroom that we would be stopping in about a half hour. We figured we could hold out until then. As one hour came and went, then another, many people on the bus were ready to revolt. We were captives with full bladders - not a good combination. We finally stopped at a defunct winery with several port-a-potties set up for our use. None of them had toilet paper. I was so glad I had a packet of tissues in my purse! They served up an outdoor lunch in the rain at the winery. We stood huddled under the shelter that was set up to serve the food under trying to eat some of the most inedible food I have ever seen in one place at time. It was not meant to be finger food, but there were no utensils provided. By the end of the luncheon the sun came out, and things started looking up.
We spouses went on a tour the next day to the little town of Taormina, and the sun shone all day. Such a drastic change from the day before, it was even too hot for a sweater. We had a lovely time touring the old Roman ruins and the beautiful vibrant town. I beleive that day was the only redeeming portion of the whole trip. The view of the sea from the picturesque hillside town was incredibly beautiful. Flowers were blooming everywhere, and the streets were clean and inviting. I spent the day with Josette Dorius (Steve’s partner’s wife), and Ann de Sutter (our partner’s wife from Belgium). We had lunch in a little outdoor café where the waiter was trying to be cute, and kept clicking his heels as though he were our slave, and we were three queens whose every wish was to be granted. We laughed all through lunch.
The following day, Steve was finished with seminars at about 1:00pm, so we had lunch together. Most of the other attendees checked out that day to go on to other cities, or home, but we couldn’t leave. You see, our travel agent had booked our flight to leave that day, with a connecting flight through Milan on the following day. That was wonderful, except she forgot to book a hotel room. When this was discovered, she checked all the hotels she could think of, and there was not a single room in all of Milan to put us in! We were forced to take a different airline out a day later, thus making the entire trip home in one day, instead of breaking it up a bit, as originally planned. We stayed one more night our hotel in Acireale (pronounced Aw-chi-dE-al-A).
So, on the day that most everyone left for home, Steve and I decided to take the train back to the town of Taormina, since he hadn’t been able to see it. We walked in the hot sun of the day until we reached the train station, where we were informed that we had just missed the train to Taormina. The ticket seller didn’t speak any English, but understood a bit of French, so he and Steve conversed in French, and it was determined that the next train to Taormina would leave the station in about 45 minutes. We sat on platform 2 and waited. We waited and waited and did some more waiting, and finally a bus (I'm not kidding, it was a bus!) came down the tracks. It was covered in graffiti. It was not our train, so we let it go by with a sigh of relief. Three seventeen pm came and went, still not a hint of our train. We kept checking the printed schedule, making sure we hadn’t misread it, and it hadn’t changed. Another bus covered in graffiti came down the tracks from the opposite direction, right on time. Still no 3:17 train. We just couldn’t figure it out.
I had consumed 2 cans of soda by this time, and needed to use the bathroom again, so while I was gone, Steve checked the schedule yet again. This time, he realized that the ticket seller had sold us a ticket for a train that only runs on holidays or other times of increased demand. The next reliable train wouldn’t come by for another hour, and even that one was questionable. The bus driver out in front of the train station told us that the next bus to the downtown area of Acireale (the town our hotel was in) would not be there for 40 minutes, and there were no taxi’s available.
We decided to walk back to the center of the little town. Acireale is on a hillside made from volcanic rock, and the walk to the center of town was not more than a few miles, but it was all uphill. There are many little steep gorges that separate sections of the town, so you have to walk around them, rather than in a straight line to the place you want to go, which increased the walking time by quite a bit. We were hot, tired, and irritable by the time we stopped for change at the local bank. The machine said it had been informed to return our card to us, and that we should call our bank. We tried again, with the same results. Knowing there was money in our account, we started worrying about why we would get such a strange message. We didn’t have much cash left, and would need some for the cab ride to the airport. We decided to ask about change at the hotel.
We stopped at two or three shops to look around, and bought the one thing I most wanted to bring home from Italy. A beautiful hand painted serving platter, about 16 inches across. It was so pretty, and just what I was hoping to find. The shop owner was a wood carver, who was in the middle of working on something big when we came in his shop. He didn’t speak any English (most people in the area of Catania, Acireale and Taormina do not speak English) but we were able to tell him what we wanted, and he wrapped up our treasure with care. I was satisfied, even with all the walking, that it had been worth it all, just to get this platter.
Because of our cash situation, Steve didn’t want to spend any of what we had on us. There are no public benches in the town (that we could see, anyway), and the only place to rest was on the chairs set out in front of the little cafes. Of course, they don’t want people stopping to rest on their chairs unless they intend to buy. I wasn’t walking another inch until I’d rested, no matter what money we had on hand, so I sat down. Steve finally realized I wasn’t going to leave until I’d had my rest, so when the waiter came to take our order, he ordered a few sodas.
By the time we walked back to our room that night, we were both too exhausted to eat dinner. We slept until about 9:30pm, then ordered room service.
The next morning we were up and packed and at the airport by 8:15. It was pouring rain, but the plane was still scheduled to take off on time, at 9:30. Our cab driver, who had quoted a price of 70,000 lire over the phone, now wanted 80,000 before he would leave. We gave him everything we had, which was about 78,000, but he went away unhappy, as did we.
Our travel agent, as I mentioned before, had booked our new flight out of Catania on a different airline, since the one we were originally booked on didn’t run a flight at that same time a day later. We took our Meridiana tickets to the counter of the AirEurope check in, as our agent had informed us we should do. We waited in line for about 20 minutes. When we got to the head of the line, they told us we would have to go and have our tickets approved by the AirEurope counter in the front of the airport. So we hauled our luggage back to the front of the airport, where we waited in another line. Finally getting to us, the girl took one of our tickets and walked over to three or four counters (including the one whose line we had just vacated) before coming back to tell us that we would have to wait for her management to decide if they would honor this ticket. We told her we would just buy another ticket, rather than wait, but she was insistent that we wait. When the verdict finally came down that AirEurope would not accept our flight coupons (because it was our fault we didn’t take the flight the day before) we were forced to buy two one way tickets to Milan in order to connect with our flight out of Italy as planned.
We paid the $350.00 fare, and followed the signs to the boarding gates, which took us directly to the gift shops, not the departure gates. I hadn’t found anything for my boys in the shops we’d been in, and thought that one particular shop would have just the right kind of thing to take home. They did, thank heavens, but when I went to pay for it, they didn’t take anything but cash. I had to leave the gifts behind, as there was no time to get change. We hurriedly located the departure gates, and gave them our tickets. They put us on a shuttle bus that took us about 10 yards (I'm not kidding) over to the waiting plane, and we boarded.
The flight was uneventful, even pleasant, with comfortable seats and friendly smiles from the flight attendants.
When we arrived in Milan, we were pinched for time, having only an hour before our connecting flight to New York was to leave. As we got off the shuttle bus from the plane, in our hurry to get checked in, we turned a corner, and the bag with our one and only treasure slipped and hit the floor. It sounded bad, but we didn’t have time to even look at it. We rushed through the corridors to the opposite end of the airport, where our check in counter was, then down the stairs to where the plane was almost ready to leave. We were two of the last 5 people to board. Unfortunately, when we landed in New York, and went to claim our luggage (to take it through customs) one of our bags had not made it on the plane – my bag.
We had a few hours in New York, so Steve took our tickets to the counter in Delta’s Crown Room where they gave us seats in an exit row. I asked Steve if he was sure they weren’t the kind that don’t recline, and he was quite sure they were not. By this time, our body clocks thought it was 10:30 at night. We’d had a very exhausting day, with a few more hours to wait before getting on yet another long flight, and I didn’t want to have to sit up through it. While we were waiting, Steve checked the damage to our platter, and found it was in four large pieces, with tiny fragments of varying sizes skipping around in the bottom of the bag. I wanted to cry by this time.
We got on the last plane of our trip, and sure enough, we were on an exit row, with SEATS THAT DON’T RECLINE! I was now laughing hysterically. It was just too much to believe. The seats on this plane have armrests that are wider than normal (thus narrowing the available seat room) and they don’t move. Having an oversized rump, they pinched at my hips the entire flight. I was never so happy to be back home as I was last night! It was around 10:30 when we arrived home, 24 hours after waking up the morning we left Sicily. My bag is still missing, but I'm so grateful to be here, that at this point, I don’t care. I don't believe I'll be going back to Sicily any time soon, if ever.