Last week in Sicily

We have had a very nice last week here in Sicilia. Last Saturday Cathy/mom and Uncle Art came to visit and stayed for a few days. It was wonderful. We were just at the point of getting bored hanging around Anna's every day so it was perfect timing to have other people there and since everything was new and exciting for them, it all felt fresh and special for us again, too. We spent plenty of time just sitting in front of the house drinking espresso or wine and admiring the view. We also took day trips down to the beach town Giardini, to Tindaris to see the Black Madonna, to Taormina for shopping and the Greek amphitheater, and to Siracusa to see the Greek ruins. Especially memorable were the harrowing car rides through the mountains to reach those places, made especially frightening by Uncle Art's tendency to watch the scenery instead of the road!(Averaging 2 near death situations a day) They left on Thursday morning to visit Agrigento and Palermo before returning to the States today.

Since we are leaving tomorrow for France but Anna is away for two more weeks, she arranged for new people to come for the rest of the time. We were expecting the new wwoofers to arrive today and so yesterday was to be our last day alone at the house. We walked up to the hill town of Castelmola in the afternoon and on the way back were looking forward to our last walk with the dogs, a nice dinner and wine. We arrived at the house to find Antonella pulling out. She stopped to say, "they are inside. Will pick you up tomorrow three o'clock." With that, she sped away and we trudged towards the house to greet our new guests. It turned out fine because the three girls are our age and very nice, and one of them loves to cook so she made us all a great dinner. We had a fun night but were a little sad we didn't get to enjoy it one last time on our own.

Since Antonella kept pushing back the time she could pick us up, today we walked into Taormina with our full packs, which wasn't as difficult as we feared it would be. We are now in Anna's apartment trying to pass the rest of the afternoon and first thing tomorrow morning we'll be off to the airport to go to France! Hard to believe it's our last night in Italy - we've been in this country for about 2 months of the trip and have gotten pretty used to the language and culture. We're happy to spend more time in France before going home, though, because we had originally hoped to be there for a lot longer than just our 2 weeks at Cavalus (though perhaps we have enough memories and stories from there to make up for the short amount of time).

Side note: We have decided to blame George W for us having to go home early, since if we weren't spending 1.5 dollars per Euro we would still have plenty of money to last another month, and probably also to go home with some leftover. Have to take every opportunity to blame things on him before he leaves office.