Bill-on-the-Hill

This one will be short, and the basic theme of the day, I'm sorry to say, is frustration.

All good things must end, and today it was time to bid farewell to Marco, D and Z, and the Volcano Discovery tour. The weather, which had been marvelous all trip, chose this day to become disagreeable, with cloud cover and a persistent light rain that would have made for unpleasant conditions on the mountain. Therefore, to do one last bit of sightseeing before getting on our various flights, we did a not-very-special windshield tour around Etna -- interesting to see what the Sicilian countryside looked like, but nothing really grabbed our attention. On the way to the airport we tried to make a side trip to the Alcantara Gorge, a scenic area resembling what Devils Postpile National Monument would look like if half of it was under water. Unfortunately, the first of several transportation snafus popped up as we were trying to get there, as our COMEDAS van driver unaccountably got lost en route, and we wandered tiny Sicilian roads for an unnecessary hour trying to find the place (which is reasonably well known, we had seen it touted at our hotel in Taormina at the beginning of the trip). Getting lost, I can see; the roads in rural Sicily look like something out of a 1980s video game -- you're just waiting for Pac-Man to come around a corner. But wandering for a full hour, without ever pulling off to ask directions, is unnecessarily macho and leaves the passengers with a highly unfavorable impression of the driver's competence, if not necessarily his manhood. I don't want to be too hard on COMEDAS here; this was really their only screwup of the trip. Still, it was a sour note to end on, although the undeniably attractive scenery of the Alcantara Gorge did compensate when we finally got there.

After this final bit of sightseeing we headed for the Catania airport, where we said our various goodbyes (and left Marco a healthy tip, which he had very definitely earned). From here the five of us were to take a WindJet flight to Rome for a day or two of more conventional touristing, while D and Z were heading back to the UK and Marco was going back to his "day job" in Trieste. It is fair to say that WindJet, one of the Discount airlines in Europe that have sprung up following deregulation, did not distinguish themselves on this flight. It was interminably delayed, with essentially zero information on projected departure time so that we couldn't wander off for a lunch, let alone escape for actual sightseeing in Catania, which is reputed to be pleasant. Even the notoriously churlish airlines of the United States generally do better about keeping passengers informed. The flight finally did go, something like three hours late if I remember correctly, plenty of time for us to do something in the vicinity if we'd known about the delay, and enough to create problems once we got to Rome. Not the least of these problems was that the Rome airport chose this day to live up to its evil reputation about baggage handling. Remember that we'd been warned that collecting baggage there took a long time, but on the in-bound flight, we really didn't have any problems. Well, they were saving them all for this day, apparently. It took for-freaking-ever to collect our bags. It was a decidedly tired, grumpy and hungry group of travelers that finally checked into the (expensive but convenient and comfortable) airport Hilton just in time to catch their excellent dinner buffet before it closed.

I suppose there's a lesson in here somewhere regarding travel, but I'm not sure what it is. Would we have been better off on one of the other airlines heading back from Sicily to Rome? Maybe, but it's not clear you can get there on anything but Alitalia, which has its own little peculiarities. It also isn't clear that any of the delays would have been mitigated by going the Alitalia route. And the lesson of the lost COMEDAS driver simply seems to be "don't screw up." Not terribly edifying, that. All told, however, as bad travel days go, this one was pretty mild; no fatalities, no violent GI distress, no lawsuits, nothing lost but time...

Tomorrow: Rome, and home.