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Arrived in Sicily on the 18th ciao Italy! On arriving in Italy we had no idea what we were in for! It has tested our courage, senses, DRIVING SKILLS, and relationship.
Quite happy I got the hang of driving on the opposite side of the road quite early although it had taken me a couple of more days to get used to the road rules or should I say lack there of! I'm sure there are rules but there is certainly no respect for them and in some instances I have now learned why..... Most roads are only wide enough for two cars and having cars parked down one side does wonders for a 2 way street!
Well back to our adventure; we travelled up to Agrigento to see the valley of the temples which was extraordinary. These temples built by the Greeks about 2000BC. When walking through and looking at the ruins, it was like we were in Greece. Today was a hot day the hottest we have experianced thus far, Carmel and I melted in the hot Mediterranean sun to top it all off we walked for about 3 hours straight with little to no shelter.
From here we decided to head towards Mt Etna to find somewhere to stay overnight so we could get an early start in the morning. This was the start of a series of events which will soon unfold; we got stuck in a traffic jam due to an accident on the Autostrada this is standstill material for minimum 1 hour while the wrekage clears ambulance arrives etc etc.......
(And you wouldn't believe it! I'm back in the same position again now "in a traffic jam due to an another accident" sitting and waiting anxiously as we have Mels 50th party to get to. Oh well looks like we are going to be late and to top it all off it has started to rain! I'm shaking my head in laughter! sometimes you have to laugh just to remain sane in these situations! At least it is giving me some time to catch up on our Blog)
......well back to on our way to Mt Etna which I had literally punched "Mt Etna" into Google maps for directions; and what a mistake that was! We didnt notice at first as we were admiring the scenery but we found ourselves on a goat track in the middle of nowhere, when we came to a huge mound in the middle of the road Carmel thew he hands up and said i was driving, which i thought was cool getting to do a bit of 4WD in Italy. the road led us to market gardens which looked like side by side prison compounds and then my God! where the hell are we? It looked like we were driving through a tip, there was general household rubbish bags strewn all over the road amd atleast 2 bags high, Carmel started loosing it! as it was starting to get dark, she was telling me to turn back, but yes; stubborn me persisted as we were way too deep now and I wasn't turning back! I pressed on making way like a D9 up the road and winding our way up the mountain, finally it looked like we reached civilisation. We decided to look for a hotel for the night and as we were driving through the streets and pulled over for a break and a drink it felt eerie! it felt like everyone was looking at us like we were their next kill; we both felt uneasy and agreed that "no way" this area is a ghetto so we left without getting a drink and proceeded onto Catania to find a reputable hotel there.
Finally next day we arrived at Mt Etna the largest volcano in Europe and the most active in the world. As you can see in our photos it was almost a lunar landscape with craters and all, here we took a cable car to near the top we opted not to go all the way via 4WD as we were running behind schedule.
We had to stop in at the airport to change cars and decided to get a GPS Navigator which we thought was a good idea after our experience with Google maps! The GPS in the car we booked did not cover streets outside of Italy which we needed seeings we were diving all the way to Paris. So we got a great deal for a Lancer Therma with built in GPS which we thought was perfect. Little did I know when we got to the car it wasn't the Lancer I was used to seeing on the streets of Sydney, it was a Tank a rebadged Chrysler 300C. Oh well! It is what it is. How bad can it be? The car was nice to drive very luxurious heaps of grunt to get you out of trouble and when doing 130Km/h on the Autostrada, we were convinced it will be all good. We headed to the car carrier and said goodbye to Sicily.
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