It is pure joy to see the young man you are becoming and we love being with you. This trip has been a crazy-accelerated time of growth and watching you grow up has been so fun. Your enthusiasm for life is infectious. Your genuine kindness is such a refreshing gift to others and a reminder of who you really are. I hope you will always embrace these qualities and accept that you are a good, good person.
We have loved watching you grow into a great traveler and although it is bitter sweet that our group adventure is now over, you will continue this inner journey. It’s true that we can’t wait for the next trip with you but more than that, it will be so rewarding to see you evolve along life’s journey. I have wished for my kids to have curiosity and to be students of life, questioning, seeking, discovering. There is humility in our smallness and a thrill in our greatness and I celebrate your journey along that exciting edge. Combined with your natural kindness, it will be exciting to see how you navigate. (Mom thought: Be sure to journal along the way;)
Thank you for being exactly who you are. You make life better. We love having you in our lives and can’t wait to see how you grow from here. We love you!
This was the line for security. I use the term line loosely. This is only the part that would fit in the frame. THIS is the security line at an airport where there is a strike, not your garden variety, but rather the kind of security line that is in the verge of becoming an angry, sleepless mob. We haven’t experienced this exactly before… hmm, something new for the trip. It appears the new experiences can legally keep happening until you actually get home.
Well, it was dicey but it worked out. Later we would experience another “something new” by way of the Paris airport. That’s something. There also narrowly missing our flight.
Maybe this is the last photo I was seeking this morning.
Leaving Rome. We survived the taxi ride to the airport and took that as an omen.
Through our travels we met others who loved Sicily, who had great memories and recommendations there, which confirmed our interest. But it appears that there’s a sort of a spectrum in experiencing Italy, as I see it; a grab-the-handlebars way and an I’ll-sit-in-the-backseat way. Sicily is the former; it requires both hands. To steer. Or hang on.
Apart from whatever the situation would be with Sicily, our Week Eight had a certain weight to it that we hadn’t realized. So close to the end. We wanted a sort of passive experience (backseat, not handlebars) after the previous weeks, but hadn’t figured that out until we landed in Palermo and drove around. It was the sound of the needle skidding across the record.
Sicily is not a passive sort of experience. In fact, it took a team approach, full faculties, wide awake.
To be fair, we are rookies, first of all. I say that because it is true – mostly – and it’s appropriate to be humble. Secondly, you see any place differently when you arrive through its airport. It requires a bit more patience before the spirit of a place can present itself. For example, to visit the beautiful Santa Fe, New Mexico, one lands in Albuquerque and then drives through the not-best part of northern New Mexico for an h-o-u-r before reaching magical Santa Fe. Train, bus or ferry terminals are typically centrally located in cities, they have to be. A few blocks and one is oriented to the spirit of the destination. Great. The drive from an airport armpit, however, can be a drain on ones sensibilities, right?
Since Rick Steves chose to omit Sicily entirely from his Italy guide book, (Rick, why?) we arrived vague on specifics and apparently off-message a bit. I could say that not having a huge plan is a testament to our trust at this point in the trip and a testament to our growing travel confidence. What that actually means is we were unprepared. Armpit. Handlebars. Whatever. We just wanted to sit by the beach, frankly, soak it all in, not have to work too hard.
The drive from the airport to our apartment felt like Cuba, or what I’ve seen of Cuba in photos. The gps took us on streets where we nearly got wedged, even after the side mirrors were pulled in. Streets weren’t marked. Weeds growing. Trash blowing. Buildings chipping. It had a distinctly neglected feel (armpit). It was going to require a bit of effort to find the Magic Sicily. This was going to transform us from rookie status if we were going to squeeze a rabbit out.
We had only a rental car, an Airbnb guest house and a week.
As it turns out, we fell in love with much of Sicily and met very special people, kind and authentic human beings, and experienced such richness in Sicily. We needed time and patience.
Palermo has a crown of mountains ringing it, keeping the climate pretty constant and the landscape visuals picturesque. The old town and epicenter is layered with centuries of influence and occuption from the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Spanish. Moorish, Baroque and Art-Nouveau architectural accents are mashed-up, surprising and eye-popping in the old towns of Sicily’s main cities.
In the late 1800’s a Belgian company came to implement a trolley system in Palermo when the city was at a particular lavish time. Inevitably, the city ran out of money so in order to pay their debt the Belgians were given a portion of land by the sea to develop, as compensation. They did a beautiful job developing and managing it for all these years. Today this neighborhood, Mondelo, has the read and feel of a Northern European seaside town. As an example of the cultural layering, Palermo has many Northern Europeans seasonally and permanently.
The Mondelo area is a part of Sicily with gated single-family villas, large even by today’s standards, tree-lined streets and shade trees ringing the gentrified beach. Today, the majority of Sicilians live in condo style housing so the walled and gated garden-like villas are quite unusual, so is the hunting park turned public park and arboretum.
Sicily is populated with a uniquely independent people. They are aware of their history. They are proud of being Sicilian. The mafia is very real here. Tourism is too but no one really falls over in the service of a tourist. In a way, that’s refreshing, if not a bit of a warning: Sure, come to Sicily, we believe it’s beautiful – you will too – but we don’t need you.
For example, it is important to remember when beckoning a police officer for a question about parking that one must not use hand gestures in any manner, no matter how innocent or sincere one may appear or believe themself to be. Have you heard about hand gestures in Italy? Have you heard about hand gestures in Sicily? May we live to make it to the airport tomorrow.
Agriculture on the inside, beaches dotting the coast, scattered archeological ruins and novelties. An old blownout volcano crater and one still very active volcano, shape the topography. Seems appropriately gritty. Drought has plagued all of Italy but nowhere has felt it longer or more intensely than on the island of Sicily, according to Sicilians. There is a sense of pride here knowing they and their crops have the fortitude to endure such things better than Rome.
We learned that Palermo has the third largest opera house in all of Europe, after Paris and Vienna. In fact they have a varsity and jv opera house, both a few blocks from each other. Opera, it turns out, is important in Sicily. And they want you to know that it is.
CEFALU
SIRACUSA
Deciding to road trip was a little bit of an admission of defeat. We were going to forfeit the fantasy week of sitting at the beach in order to discover Sicily, a departure from the relaxing-in-the-backseat mindset we had wanted. We are so glad we drove the three-and-a-half hours to the opposite corner of the island to Siracusa.
Siracusa is a breezy and sunny, old European/Mediterranean town with castles and Greek ruins turned Roman ruins turned cathedrals. The ruins are stacked and leaning in amongst the renaissance, neoclassical and contemporary structures. Their 1200th century cathedral, for example, was built right ontop and wrapped around a Greek temple from 500bc.
We had some of our best strolling through Ortiga, the old town.
Best cannoli, hands down, melt in your mouth.
After overnighting in Siracusa, the next morning we headed on to another cool part of Sicily for the day, Agrigento. After our adventures there we had a harrowing drive through the interior of Sicily at night, in the dark, making our way back to Palermo late that night. It almost erased the amazing things we did and experienced in Agrigento earlier in the day. You know, like how bad ending can ruin a great book. Before the 2 hour white-knuckle drive in the dark, we had an epic day.
Catalonia, the state in which Barcelona sits, is on the verge of gaining its independence from Spain. A vote on October 1st is expected to pass, although Spain isn’t talking about it, and certainly doesn’t want to acknowledge that it may lose its strongest economy. When we escape the tourist-choked areas or visit with Catalonians, the passion of this movement is evident, flags on balconies, Catalan language seen everywhere, often before Spanish.
There is a poetry and passion to this that is so stirring. In 2014, a public protest of Catalonians linking arms for 250 miles from the French border down to Valencia, shocking Spain, crying we are many and we are together. After time and other eventualities, it came to a referendum, passing by 80% of the vote, shocking Spain into a scurried rebuttal and demand for a revote. That is the October 1st vote.
We are preparing to come home knowing that the next time we return to Barcelona it will likely be very different. At the very least, it may be Barcelona of Catalonia, it’s own country. We have bought-in and are rooting for this amazing culture. What an inspiration, personally, to have such verve as a people, a culture, a state. What a thrill it would be to be a part of a nation with so much unified pride and commitment.
These days we discuss coming home daily, but not that anyone is sick with missing it. On the contrary. It seems instead that are going to miss the togetherness.
We look forward to catching up with friends and family. See you soon.
We have only lost one of our kids on the trip (so far). It was Aidan. We searched the town for an hour before we discovered we had locked him inside the apartment.
We’ve reached the point where the bickering has become its own language, like an ether.
It’s like a form of Yiddish, a language that you hear but don’t really recognize.
After being confined as a family in multiple forms of planes, trains, and automobiles over the last several weeks, one begins to experience it as if in a fuge state, somewhere in the transition from the absurd to the sublime.
Occasionally, in a trance-like state of avoidance something suddenly will snap you back into reality, perhaps a truck hurdling toward you, a punch being thrown, or in yesterday’s case, Julie yelling, “stop! take your hands off his penis!”…
This is a true story.
(In a case of meta-bickering, the children were bickering as I was writing this.)
Rovinj is located in the region (state?) of Istria, a lush and hilly peninsula that wedges into the Adriatic. Croatia borders Slovenia and Italy and is close to Austria in this region so there are many influences and a steady stream of European tourists. I heard somewhere that Istria itself has a different Croatian feel but that it is an artist Mecca. If this is for real this is going to be great!
The cats in Dubrovnik, Croatia (which is in Europe, by the way), are cute but can be deadly.
I did not expect there to be so many cats. We saw them in all sorts of places. We saw them in the streets, under bushes, at the beach, laying under motorcycles, even under my brother’s chair at dinner. They were everywhere. Seeing them, I wanted to play with them. They were cute but when I got closer I saw some of them had bugs in their eyes. I felt badly for them. Others were cute but deadly.
Our first day in Dubrovnik I saw a mother cat laying down nursing her six babies. She was a tabby cat. Two of her babies were also tabbies. One was white and orange with stripes. I named him Peanut. He was my favorite. The other three were black. There were two other grownup cats lying nearby. I named the mommy Roxy.
One of the cats I saw with infected eyes I wanted to pet but my mom said not to touch it, so I didn’t. I named him Bruce Wayne.
On the same night, I was looking for cats with my sister. I saw a black and white cat. My sister told me not to pet it but I could not resist. It let me pet it on his head for three seconds. I was surprised when it whipped around and bit me! It was trying to grab on to me. Maybe it was trying to get me to leave it alone. I named it Pussy Cat.
On our way to dinner, in one of the stairways of Old Town, I saw a gray kitty. I named it Alfred. This is one of the only cats that was nice to me. He let me pet him and hold him.
I hope that we see more cats on our trip. By the way, my dad is allergic to cats. It is ironic that I’m writing a story about cats.