Day 48 (Castello di Mola)

Today is 73, partly cloudy and windy. It looks like another nice day. We are going to get an early breakfast and head to Castello di Mola. This is a city and fortress at the top of a mountain. It is about a 30 min drive up a very narrow and winding road. It is a fun drive with a stick shift but if I was driving my truck I would have no metal left on the sides. The traffic on the way up was busy. Cars around every turn, motorcycles and mopeds speeding in and out and in between traffic. Then there are the buses a taxi cabs. I have no idea why there are not more accidents. This is a stressful time for Lori and between dodging cars, motorcycles and stone walls she is not a helpful side seat driver!

We had our Apple Maps routed to a public lot that was near the top. We arrived and found a spot to park. We made the short walk to the top where there is an old fort which was built around the 1100’s. They are not positive of when it was built but they found a chiseled plaque that gave them some clues of the time frame. The rest is just an educated guess.

We walked around town which gave us some really cool views of Mt Etna. Still no eruption. The area is famous for an almond wine that is more like a liqueur. Of course we had to try it. It was pretty sweet so Lori was not interested. I thought it was pretty good but not enough to buy a bottle. This a famous spot. There is a large book that people sign including Pope John Paul when he was a bishop, and several famous actors. We also signed the book so maybe we will return someday to check that out.

The walk around was nice but a lot of hills and stairs. It was worth the walk to see the many views. I had the parking spot paid for until 2:30pm. We pretty much saw the whole town in about 1.5hrs. It is a pretty small city.

We returned to the car with about 2.5hrs left on our parking pass. I grabbed the pass and gave it to a family that just pulled in. They didn’t speak English very well but understood what I was giving them. They were thankful and offered me money which I refused. We started the downhill slalom back to our hotel. Fun for me, not fun for Lori.

We made it back to the hotel unscathed and decided to catch up with a few things. Today is Christian’s birthday so we sent him a text. Then we needed to complete some paperwork for Sophia’s condo. We needed to use the hotel business center for its copier. Trying to figure out a windows computer is really difficult when you are used to an Apple computer. Not to mention it is in Italian. That took a couple hours to figure out.

After that we went to the pool bar to get something to eat. I had a hamburger and fries because I am really missing those. They say that it is beef but I haven’t seen a cow in several weeks. I don’t know what or where the burger came from. We do see a lot of cats running wild, hmm. The fries are always delicious though. It was too windy to hang out at the pool bar so W e headed back to the room to watch some TV and call it a night.