My Sicilian Adventure

Hey everyone!

First off, I’ve decided this website isn’t just going to be about fishing (although that’s a big part of it :-P). Since I haven’t gone fishing lately (I was supposed to be going over the weekend… don’t quite know what happened there /:[ ) I haven’t got any fishing stories, so I’ll just zoom all the way back to the 1st of March when my adventures around the world really began.

If any of you have ever moved country you’ll know how difficult packing is! I had to bring my WHOLE life in just one suitcase! I’m not so great with throwing things out, quite a few times I kept packing arbitrary items… for instance pink, flower, fairy lights kept managing to find its own way in the suitcase… okay it was me… aww how I loved those… eventually though I replaced them with more… useful things after being persuaded by the fact that the plug sockets in Sicily would be different… it’s okay though taking them out freed up like half my suitcase :-P!

I also had to leave my (absolutely GORGEOUS) electric guitar which I’d only gotten 2 months earlier!!! That was so depressing, I WAS going to attempt bringing it as hand luggage but didn’t really want the hassle and it was SOOO heavy.

To get on with the story, grrr as I’m sure you can see I have a tendency to move onto a different subject and get distracted… Anyway, a few days before the 1st (which is when we departed Ireland) my gran, (I just call her Karen, so from now on I’m saying Karen) was staying with us and gave us the FRIGHT of our lives (I’m using us and our because my parents, sister, second cousin and my uncle were in the house at the time, with me of course :)).

I was in a deep sleep because I wanted to get a relatively early night, when I heard shouts and yells and stuff of MOM, MOM!. I ran downstairs, into the lounge expecting my gran to be doing something stupid instead my uncle and my dad were giving her C.P.R., later I found out she’d collapsed and her heart had stopped beating! The rugby was on that night so Karen must of just been over excited or something :-P, a few hours earlier she was jumping around cheering on her favourite team :-P… why was I on this story…?

Oh right yeah well Karen was supposed to be taking Gizmo (our small dog, I’m sure I’ve told you about him before) on the ferry with her, across to England there she would look after him at her house until we were settled in Sicily (since we just got up and left and didn’t bother finding a house first since someone, not saying anybody’s name in particular … usually people would put the persons name here and I’m very tempted to… but I won’t since I’m so, very nice :-P… said that it was easy enough to find a house there. This later proved as wrong :-P. See there I go again, off a different direction to the story… although this has got something to do with the story so I guess it’s not that bad…!

(Gizmo!!! The post looked very boring so thought I'd give you a glimpse of him :)! He's on the window sill at my gran's house, I think Gizmo spent too much of his time watching my uncle and aunt's cat... He's in England hints the fact that he's wearing a shirt :-P!)

I’ll continue with what I was saying, Karen came around and my parents rushed her to hospital, she’s all fine now though :). But she was supposed to be taking Gizmo on Tuesday, we were going to be leaving on Thursday. Gizmo and Karen’s departure was postponed until Saturday so I had to say goodbye to Gizmo and leave him behind with Karen and my great-gran (Maisey). It was so upsetting! I knew I wouldn’t see him for at least a month, an actual fact it was TWO!

And off our taxi took us (since we’d left our car with a friend who was going to sell it for us). We slept at the hotel across the road from Belfast International Airport, because our flight was at 08:00 am… FAAAAAAAAR too early for me :-P.

Somehow I managed to get up and be ready in the morning for my flight. My sister actually has some footage of us that morning… which I’ll have to find, most of the recording I was slouched over my suitcase on the floor of the hotel bedroom, moaning at her not to film me :-P! Venetia (my sister) did get some of the planes taking off though and you can see how early it is because of how dark it is outside!

Once we were all ready and had had breakfast we all crossed the road and checked in. Our first flight was very short and was surprisingly painless! Usually my ears pop… with a lot of pain going up and then coming down, despite my efforts to chew gum, or suck lollipops… sometimes I’d even try sleeping. We flew to Stansted in England first, sat around for a few hours, had lunch at a really nice Italian place, oh my word, the CHEESECAKE was the NICEST there it was so yummy!!!!

Once we only had about an hour of waiting to do we found out that our luggage was too heavy for the next flight to Palermo, Sicily! Quickly we sorted it out, I had to leave the coolest nail set ever behind, which I’d also only got two months earlier, it had an electric nail buffing machine!!!

We checked in again, and got on the plane to Palermo, my ears didn’t pop too painfully this time either, something in the day to be thankful about :-D!

After a few hours, the pilot landed the plane safely and we all got out, grabbed our luggage and walked around to the exit which came out onto one of the most Sicilian scenes that I’d ever seen… mainly because I’d only ever been to Sicily once and it was just for a day trip from Malta to Mount. Etna, to get there we had to go on one of the fastest catamarans in the world! Well anyway it was tonnes of black cabs parked outside with all of the taxi drivers dressed up like people from the “Mafia” with their leather jackets on and cigars or cigarettes hanging out of their mouths… yet, they weren’t standing around looking cool, or sitting in their cabs, they were playing football and yelling at each other in Sicilian… it was quite late already so the lighting just seemed to make everything a whole lot scarier :-P.

We managed to drag one of the taxi drivers away from his football, packed up our suitcases, buckled ourselves in and off we went. They drive like… CRAZY there! I was sitting in the middle at the back and just keeping my eye on the speedometer. Once we arrived at The Holiday Inn, the cab driver made us pay 60 euros for a five minute journey, so if you ever go to Sicily, I think it’s best to just hire a car out. We went inside only to find a miserable looking woman slouched in her seat at the reception. My dad used his broken Sicilian and asked if she had any rooms, she was reluctant at first, finally she gave us our key, and we went up stairs. At this moment, I just wanted to go right back to our home in Ireland. I had a bath, was reassured by my dad that I just needed a good night's sleep and I’d enjoy it more in the morning, so I went to bed.

Will continue with my Sicilian adventure tomorrow :-). Sorry this post had nothing to do with fishing.
Hope to hear from you all soon, still waiting on those pictures :-P.
- Bianca