Night Walk, Morning Walk

 One of the hallmarks of this new experimental lifestyle is walking. There is the walking to get anything as we don't have a car. But there is also regular walking in the morning. I tend to be out before 7am and walk for an hour to an hour and a half. Then in the evening, I go out after 7pm for another 45 minutes. Here is a pictorial rendition.

Our Town

The Evening Walk

It is still tourist time. School doesn't start here until September 19

Catching the sunset

The Morning Walk

Quiet and solitude

Right out of the door of the apartment

One doesn't think of Sicily as being the cleanest place but here in the tourist part of  Cefalú every morning they are out collecting all the trash and cleaning the streets.

Long lines of quiet restaurants that will be packed by the lunch and dinner hours

 

As crowded as the beaches are as the sunsets, they are empty now

There are others who enjoy the early morning solitude

And the city bathed in early morning light

Ode to the poetic

You seen pictures of this monolith in my previous posts. Most of them evening shots. 

Now I ask you, understanding the poetic Italian and Sicilian soul, what would be the name the locals would call this powerful symbol of their town? Would they name it after some legendary hero or God of Myth? Would they call it something like the Goliath of Sicily? 

No

It is called...

The Rock

One Week In

So how is it going one week into the experiment?

Good news is that Wife and I have not killed each other yet living in a much smaller space than we are used to. Second piece of good news, we haven't gone postal and killed the hordes of tourists that are still filling the beach here since our poor research didn't turn up the fact that school doesn't start in Sicily until September 19. Actually, this weekend has much fewer people than last weekend. The first weekend, the weekend we arrived, was nuts.

We are adjusting to the heat and humidity. Actually the humidity much more than the heat because it is no hotter than New Mexico. But the temperature doesn't go down as much at night. We have been doing extensive walking in the morning. We will be out before or just around 7am and will be out for an hour to an hour and a half. We are exploring all aspects of this small city and getting a feeling for how it works.

We will eat breakfast somewhere between 9 and 10 and then take a little nap. I might go out and get a something I need for our dinner. I will start cooking at 1pm and we eat dinner around 2pm. At 3pm I will start having video meetings in Ghana and the United States. These usually wrap up around 8pm. Then we take another short walk along the ocean. A small snack when we get back maybe of some cheese. We go to sleep around 11pm.

We are talking about getting a car or a car and driver to do a bit of touring in the coming weeks. We are figuring out the patterns of when certain stores are open. For example, the fish shops of which their are about a half a dozen, mostly seem to focus on being open on the weekend. There are many small bakeries. It is very hard to resist buying fresh bread, even when you have left over. There are tons of small vegetable and fruit markets. But, I have yet to find a butcher! Strange. 

I am definitely getting into the rhythm of buying and cooking. I have yet to break out my camera, just taking the occasional shot with my phone. I think that might change this coming week. 

Gelato, One of the Major Food Groups Here

Miscellaneous Pictures from Morning and Evening Walks Around Town

Gastronomic Fun

The quality of food is so good and the price is so affordable, there is little incentive to eat out if you like to cook. We used leftover bread to make the breading for the fish. The fish itself was delectable. And lovely, fresh Sicilian wine? We spent $80 for food at today's shop which will carry us at least halfway through the week or more. We went out to eat yesterday just for a break from cooking. It was $70.

Day Three - Reinventing Life in Cefalú

 One of the big reasons for coming to Cefalú two months is to experiment with a reset of how I live.

 

During the period, we now label as 'the semi-retired years', I had succeeded in tamping down my Type A personality behavior...or at least redirecting it from work to travel (I don't think anyone who observed Wife and I traveling would ever use the word 'relaxing' as a descriptor of us traveling). I was still working but I wasn't that intense about it. Intensity was saved for planning and implementing travel. 

 

All that changed in 2019 and 2020 with the advent of Theodora and the pandemic. The amount of energy that was required to realize Theodora from an idea to a reality was enormous as was the sheer amount of time. The pandemic took all the old travel behavior pattern and threw it out the window. As I went into 2021, things opened up but I had retrained myself back into the Type A work mode again. It was exacerbated by the time difference between Ghana and New Mexico. Suddenly I was working even longer hours because I had people I was working with in both areas. 

As I moved into 2022, many signs showed that this pattern needed to stop. I was not burnt out. I was getting a lot of joy from how I was doing things. But other joys were being ignored and at my age time is running out to do them. Then there is the need to diminish my role in Theodora so it has the ability to go on without me. 

In coming here, I have put in place a number of things that are going to mandate change. For one, the time difference. I am now ahead of both Ghana and the US so the only time to talk is the afternoon and evening. I, in fact, set a limit of 6 hours a day for meeting times in the late afternoon and early evening. This is leaving a big slice of time in the day to do something else (we will get to that in another post).

 

Another, is not having a vehicle. We specifically chose where we are staying because of the availability of just about everything we need in walking distance. We had talked about renting a car for some day trips but the prices I've seen for those so far have been crazy. So none of those planned so far. For the first time in my adult life, I will be living for more than a week or two in a place without an automobile at hand.

The combination of the two above is leading to changes in sleeping patterns and eating patterns. 

It is way too early to jump to conclusions. But so far, the change has been dramatic.

Day Two in Cefalú - Acclimating

 Shaking off the cobwebs. Got a reasonable night's sleep. Coming to grips with the fact there are way more people and is way hotter than we had anticipated.

I was up very early and took a long walk through the old town with barely a soul to be seen. I came back, decided to not take a shower because Wife was still sleeping and thought she might want to take a walk too. But it was way hotter and I was suffering from not having eaten for five hours (I got up at 4am and it was now after 9am). I went back to the apartment while Wife went on and made some breakfast. I showered and finally shaved - the first time since we left Albuquerque on Friday. Felt so good. Took a nap and then cooked my first meal here. This is one of the things I am really looking forward to - cooking locally. I noticed the produce we bought is going fast. Now I see why you buy what you need for the day and cook it. In the humidity here, things go bad much quicker than in the high desert of home.

I am working during this trip but with a real mind to cut back the amount of time I spend on my projects. Today I was working on an update letter for my Theodora Donors and Volunteers. I do one a quarter and it is significant undertaking. 

As we moved into the early evening, Wife suggested we take another walk. So off we went going in the opposite direction along the coast. We went way further than I thought we would. Then back to the apartment for burnt microwave popcorn (I had some setting wrong on the damn machine) and working on blog posts. 

I am not doing any real photography yet. Just kind of scoping things out. But took some shots during both walks with my phone.

 You KNOW how much de-I loves to take pictures of laundry. Had to take one of our own!

 

 Moving through the town at 6:15 am. Things are quiet except for the the rubbish collection.

 Some nice sunrise time shots.

 I was super excited to see this. A Medieval Toilet! How cool is that!

 But sadly the word translated to laundry room

 And the shots from our evening walk

Arrival In Cefalú Our Home For The Next Two Months

 After 27 hours, four flights, and five airports later we arrive in Cefalú, Sicily. It is way hotter and more crowded than when we were here last fall. Why, this would surprise us considering  the fact we were coming in almost two months earlier at the end of summer rather than the middle of fall, is a mystery only Wife and I will be able to explain. 

The heat and crowds are causing Wife and I to have to juggle our ideas of what we would be doing some. However, I want to wait until this week and see how crowded it is during the week rather than during the weekend. 

We were pretty punchy today so were kind of going off in a fog. But we did get out to do our initial shopping done. Getting back we were wiped out. The heat. The effort to find things. (Freaking spices were off in this corner of the huge Gourmet Decco (most recommended supermarket by de-I in Sicily) away from anything where you'd expect the to be - more on supermarket layouts in a future post.). Our fatigue and hunger. We needed a nap bad when we got back. 

Getting up from our nap we staggered into the kitchen and sat down at the kitchen table. We know we need to eat but can't get the energy up to do anything. I ask Wife, where are the potato chips we got last night? She reaches over to a drawer, not even getting out of her chair, and pulls them out. We eat. I say, "how about some grapes." "Sure." We eat some more. "Some protein would be good." I get some the cheese we bought. "Some bread would be good...and so on until our normal French picnic meal is assembled. 

We rested more in the afternoon. We Skyped through out the day with our various children across the globe. In the evening, we went out and bought a prepared pasta for Take Away and made a little salad. I think we will be much better tomorrow. 

Some Photos

Traveling Expands the Mind.

Who would believe?

 Do they really get enough camels coming through the Munich Airport to warrant their own Smoking Zone?

A Quick Tour of our Apartment

The view from our front porch where I am taking coffee on awaking

Walking back from the Gourmet Decco to the apartment

We had our landlord pick up this shopping trolley from Amazon Italy. For $70, it is going to be well worth it.

One of the nice things about our apartment is there is a mini-supermarket right by our entrance. And it has take-away and eat-in food place too.

 

 I fully plan to try everyone of these burgers before I leave!

MUPGT False Alarm - But We Are Put On Notice

 Because of the high price of airfare this year, when we made our reservations to fly to Sicily I was forced to do the trick of booking the international leg starting from a hub city (Chicago), and a separate ticket to get to the Hub. I had done this like six months ago. In between there had been multiple changes in the airline schedule getting to and from Chicago. I even had to change airlines and rebook to accommodate these changes. But at least, I was on one airline (United) even if it was two separate flights and I had to collect luggage, recheck luggage and go through security again in Chicago.

Our flight was from Albuquerque to Denver, changing planes in Denver, going on to Chicago. The airline apps now have a feature where you can track your luggage. Doing so while in the plane waiting to take off, I could see that one of our bags was not supposed to be loaded on the plane. I kept waiting for it to show up. Finally, as we were pushing back from the gate, I asked a flight attendant "How accurate are these apps?" "Oh, very was the reply." "Well", I said to myself, "if that's the case, I'm screwed. I can here the Magical Unicorn Pony God of Travel snickering in the distance. If I arrive in Chicago, the luggage isn't there, how are they going to send it on when the next flight is booked on a different ticket?

Then we stop taxiing and come back to the gate. They say that the weight and balance on the plane is wrong and they have to correct it before they take off. I've never seen anything like that on a big plane like we were flying (a Boeing 777).

Well, there is nothing we can do about it, so it is off to Chicago we go. Of course, our bags were there just fine. Wife is convinced they went back to the gate in Denver because they realized they had missed a bunch of bags. Whatever, we are in Chicago and headed to Munich next.