November 13 - A detour on the way to the airport - Aci Castello

 This is the day we head home.  The trip will take 50 hours - a ridiculous amount of time - to get to Albuquerque.  This is because Turkish Airlines canceled the flight between Catania and Istanbul on our original schedule and we had to leave Catania a day earlier leaving us with a long-long layover in Istanbul.  We decided to pay for a hotel in the Istanbul airport, even though we wouldn't get there until around 1:30am and they kicked you out at 8am the next morning.  

We left Taormina around 10 - 11am and decided to take the toll road.  But to get to the toll road we had many windy roads.  We had a lot of time to kill so decided on one last adventure - a stop at Aci Castello.

We had a bit of driving adventure getting to this spot - but we did find a good parking spot near this scene.  You can see the Norman castle off in the distance.  We didn't notice at first how many cats there were playing around these boats.  See the cat in the first boat at the bottom of the photo?

The queen of the harbor!

This fishing village is quite close to Mount Aetna and has been destroyed many times by the volcano - leaving behind mounds of volcanic basalt.

To the right of this scene were the supports for a road as shown below and steps up to the upper town area.

You cannot escape the heads anywhere in Sicily!

Scenes from the village.

There was a large plaza to the left of the castle and a walkway along the cliffs leading away from the castle.

The plaza is in back of Michael.  We had set the GPS to take us to the center of the town.  This is where it took us.  Since most of the roads in the village are about this wide - they are usually one way.  Our route took us in a zig-zag pattern through town to this spot.  We drove right up to the plaza before we realized that it was a dead end.  There was another car right behind us.  Finally that car backed up - and we did too.  Michael kept hitting the curb in his efforts to not damage the cars!  So we got out of there in fits and starts.  About a block back there was a wider area where we were able to turn around.  I though Michael was handling the whole thing very calmly, but later he declared that this was the most stressful driving experience of the trip.  

We stopped at a restaurant for lunch and enjoyed these views.

There was a misunderstanding when we ordered lunch.  I thought I was asking if the potatoes that came with my fish were French fries - it turns out the waiter thought we wanted a big plate of fries.  My fish was the best of the trip to Sicily.