Lori and Troy do Europe 2025

Today is supposed to be 84 and sunny. This may be the hottest day of the trip. Today is also Daylight savings time in Italy. 1 week before the USA. We had a nice extra hour of sleep and headed for breakfast. What a nice spread! They had pretty much everything that you could think of including made to order eggs and omelettes and a huge tray of cannolis which did not last long. Afterwards we walked around the hotel grounds and went back to our room.

We plan on just a pool/sea day today. I caught up on some work and we planned out the rest of our trip. Monday we plan on driving back to Taormina and visiting Castello di Mola. It is the castle that we skipped yesterday. Tuesday we will get an early breakfast and drive to Mt. Etna. We plan on taking a cable car up to an elevation short of the peak. There they have some options for us. One is a guided hike to a crater. The other is a 4×4 bus and then a short walk to a crater. If we are lucky we will witness an eruption. There was a significant eruption on June 2, 2025. It had lava flows until Sept 2, 2025. My research shows nothing is happening at the moment but my fingers are crossed. After that we will drive to Enna which is supposed to be the best view of the volcano peak. Wednesday is a 2 night stay in Agrigento. Then Friday and Saturday night we will stay in Cefalù. Sunday we will drive to Palermo where will fly to Amsterdam and stay Sunday night. Then we we will fly from Amsterdam to Detroit on either Monday or Tuesday depending if we can get on a flight via standby. We plan to be home Tuesday or Wednesday.

While working we kept hearing what sounded like drips. I immediately started trying to locate the source. I found water dripping from our hallway ceiling. At first I thought it was an overflowing tub from above us but soon realised that it was our A/C unit. We called maintenance and told them about the issue. Lori began dreaming of another upgrade. The guy showed up, bing bang boom and all was fixed. It took him about 15 minutes. Yup, no upgrade which I am glad about. I didn’t want to repack again.

After all that work, planning and repair, I went for a swim in the Ionian Sea. I always thought it was the Mediterranean Sea but maybe someone wanted to make a mark and rename a portion of it. Regardless, I checked off another swim in another body of water. Being that it was 80 degrees it felt pretty good. Lori took some pictures and made sure that I was not dragged away by some sea creature. Afterwards I went to the room to change and Lori went to the pool bar to hang with Roberto and watch pool boys. I don’t blame her. Watching an evolving Buddhist idle try to swim probably needed a scenery reset. I joined her after changing and we enjoyed a bottle of Rose’ while looking across the pool at the sea.

We decided that a salad would suffice for tonight’s meal. Roberto brought Lori a Tuna steak salad and I got an Octopus salad. I think I will go with the Tuna steak next time. I prefer Octopus grilled. We ordered a bottle of red wine from the region to go with our meal. Roberto seems to be the only waiter that knows where this particular bottle is located in the hotel. It is called Porta Del Vento, Altroverso 22, Nerello Mascalese. It tastes a lot like a Pinot Noir. The time change has us tired early so we headed back to the room. It was a nice relaxing day.