Florio Park Hotel Palermo

WE depart Sicily with wonderful memories of sunny skies, blue Mediterranean seas, green hillsides covered with grape vines and olive trees, old cities, castles and greek temples, and of course good food. <br>We will see more sights in Rome, and then travel down the coast to Sorrento and Amalfi. I will post more about the things we are doing and seeing as we continue our trip.

... had decided to put a different boat in place of the boat on my ticket. To get to the boat I had to walk past moving fork lifts and through little alleyways and ask a security card if it was my boat. Then I waited with a bunch of people who weren't even getting on my boat. Once on the boat I had to find my room and then realised I had to find the place to get the key for my room! It was a big boat. Once in my room I was lucky because I found out it was a 4 bunk dorm room and I was ...

... everything around it! Quite a bit of 'smoke' issuing from the volcano meant one could not really see the 3400m summit, even from a good distance.<br><br><br><br>Our van took us up the neverending winding access road up Etna, until we reached 2000m elevation, and the tourist centre of the volcano came into view. This is where all the souvenir shops, eateries, car parks, bus-stops are all situated. Marco dropped us off near a restaurant and adjacent crater walk, advising us we ...

... only 20 minutes out of the city centre, Mondello appeared to us to be a sleepy, quiet, pretty place, certainly around mid-morning on a Monday!<br><br><br>Mondello is also a fishing village, and there was no shortage of boats moored en masse opposite the main square. Small stalls were selling freshly caught fish, and huge gulls hovered, swooped &amp; ran in groups along this portion of the shore to grab any scraps or morsels they could.<br><br>While strolling along the ...

... time-trial car race was taking place on the winding roads on one side of the mountain, meaning police had closed that route to the top. The noise of the straining engines could be heard echoing around the lower reaches of the place, and was quite interesting to watch the speeds of the cars as they wound their way past, below our panoramic viewing area up high.<br><br>Our return trip to Palermo featured 120-140kph speeds on the motorway, even in a Mercedes van!<br><br><br>

... tiles in the world....truly something to see, and the views across Palermo &amp; the nearby coastline were very nice as well.<br><br><br><br>A morning well spent, and well worth the money, as we saw &amp; learnt so much more than tourists travelling by themselves would expect to. We walked to local trattoria for a late lunch, then stocked up on supplies at the nearby supermercato, before snacks &amp; rums for tea and an early night!<br><br><br><br><br>

... after seeing so many. Our cruise is almost over - only one more <br>port tomorrow. Julie has already started packing. We bought some <br>mosaics in Tunisia yesterday to go with the other trinkets collected <br>along the way - not sure where it is all going to go...<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br>

If you have doubts whether the mafia is still working... I don't.<br>Palermo is a charming mediterranean city, his highlights are so great, his Cathedral is amazing, but try not to get lost in the streets... we saw a peculiar street market and we decided to ...

... performance. During free time this afternoon several of us taxi to the Catacomb de Cappuccine, an eerie place where people had made arrangements in life to have their bodies displayed after death. They are hanging on the walls and lying on open shelves or in coffins with glass on the sides. The earliest is 1599, and many are dated in the 1800's. We get a great sampling of the costumes of the ...

... for the next day and headed off on foot to see the town. We were also keen to try some of this delicious street food we've been reading about. We wandered down the main street past the old theatre and to an intersection called Quattro Canti. It is a much more beautiful city than we were expecting, lovely grand old buildings and Piazzas and some amazing architectural fusion of the many different styles brought to the region by its previous ...