Our trip thus far has been tightly choreographed from months ago: Napoli, Catania, Siracusa, Catania, Messina, Palermo, Malta, ?????
We left the second half of the trip completely open, figuring we’d return to some place in Sicily now that we sort of knew the lay of the land. But we’re a bit Sicilied-out by now, and also really tired of having to pack up and travel every two nights. Granted, packing up is easier now that we’re without Sam’s luggage 😀
I had always figured it would be kind of exciting to not have any plans, and just figure things out on the fly. My big mistake was that I’d assumed by now we’d know exactly where we wanted to go!
But we don’t, and we now have to leave Malta for… somewhere. Somewhere where we could at least get a room! So we need a plan quickly… our only touchstone was that two weeks from now, our flight back home leaves from Napoli. So, maybe we should simply head back to Napoli and figure it all out from there. Hello, Ryan Air??
We lucked into a bulkhead row, but that meant everything had to go overhead. The flight attendant took offense to Sam still holding her purse, and brusquely told her, “Brown needs to go up!” So from that point on, Sam’s purse had a name which we still use to this day: Brown!
Sam spent our last couple of hours in Malta trying to find a good lunch place in Napoli. Believe it or not, that is the extent of our plan so far: get to Napoli and have lunch 😀 After lunch, we don’t have a further destination… tonight’s bed is still just a vague idea. But first things first, gotta have a great lunch!
Turns out our restaurant was in a pedestrian zone, so our suicidal cabbie drops us as close as he can and gestures a million different ways as to how we can somehow find it. Anyway, lunch was fantastic, in the Spanish Quarter… but it was pretty loud and pretty trashy so we decided we didn’t want to stay in that area. However we did like it around our first hotel, many moons ago, so we hiked to the Metro and made our way back to our old hotel San Pietro, praying they’d have a room for us for at least one night.
We figured out our metro stops, then figured out the streets, and we finally made it back to our old hotel. The hilarious front-desk staff were amazed to see us: “You two again??” Sam sweet-talked them into a room for three nights at a pretty awesome rate—they just love her here in Italy, trying her best with the language, and she’s pretty darn close. I notice the advice they give her on pronunciation and so forth is getting more and more picky, like they’re saying “you are so aclosa, just a lettle bita mora!!”
Now we are a lot calmer: our new plan has a three-day runway! It felt sooooooo good to drop all our stuff down in an actual hotel room and just collapse on the bed. But then of course dinner was looming….
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