Sicily 2021 #3 - Turbulence On Our Approach To Arenella

 After our one day in Catania, the next stage of our journey was to meet up with the #3 clan at a rental south of Siracusa (Syracuse for you English speakers...and not NY but here in Sicily). Sounds like a fairly straight forward process. But ah! Here is where the joy and adventure of international do-it-yourself travel comes into play.

We departed our Catania rental (thanks but I think we will skip going back to Catania at the end of our trip) picked up by the same driver who got us at the airport which was nice. Getting to the airport rental area, It was mobbed! There seemed to a system of taking numbers to be checked in, but observing it for a good 20 minutes we determined, no one was actually going by that system. Then I noticed a separate counter for those who checked-in on line. I was pretty sure I had done that. So with hope in my heart I went to that line which only had ONE person ahead of me. UNFORTUNATELY (for me), this was a party from Denmark who actually were renting FOUR Vehicles for Four different members of their party! %@#!&

I finally got to the desk (hoping to God I actually did the on-line check-in). The woman at the check-in was so sweet. How she maintained her good humor in the face of the chaos of that rental counter, I do not know. But YES I did check-in on line! It only took a short while and we were in our vehicle. Of course, there is the trying to figure out the Euro configured car, starting to drive in the very much narrower confines of Europe. And there was trying to get the GPS on my phone to speak to me. This has been an ongoing process over about a year. I finally got Apple Maps to speak directions through my hearing aids...ONLY.  Not the phone speaker, just the hearing aids. So Wife can't hear the instructions (and can't see the display either since the way the windshield mount is working, it has to be angled toward me!). To say this is disconcerting to Wife, is like saying red wine is red. 

But, I must say the Apple Maps has been doing a great job with the direction. We head off to the rental which is about an hour from Catania Airport. I won't go too much into our run in with the agent representing the rental who was a b___h about being exactly on-time to the minute or the myriad of issues we've had with the rental like hot water, power outage, internet down (most of which could have been avoided with some instructions), but finally the #3's arrived and we began to settle in.

Now you might say, 'Oh My God de-I, this sounds horrible!' and it wasn't fun. BUT, one of the things we have found we get traveling the way we do is CHALLENGE. All these things are challenges. And Wife and I have noted over the years that all these travel challenges keep us mentally sharper, alert, observant and aware. As an older person, it is really important to be doing this. The last year and a half of no travel and not even getting much out of our house showed just how much of that we've lost in that regard. So though frustrated on one plane, on another we are feeling deeply satisfied that we are back in the travel saddle again!