TUESDAY AUGUST 21, CEFALU
My sister in law Kerry is awesome.
Not only did she find this beautiful villa we were staying at, she also managed to get them to provide concierge service and a taxi service with a dispatcher and driver who spoke passable English. Angelo was the concierge/host who brought us breakfast Sunday morning. He also was the one who took the ladies on the walking tour.
Salvatore was the poor guy who drove us to and from town every day. Unlike the bald dude who drove us from the hotel to the villa on Saturday, Salvatore was friendly and chatty. He was also a tad crazy.
For example, we decided once again to attempt to get that good old fashioned Italian haircut. We asked Salvatore, who proceeded to drive up to a barber shop, jump out of the car, run in (car still running in the middle of a narrow street BTW) and ask the guy to give Timmy and I cuts. The barber wrote 1245 on a piece of paper. It was about 11:30, so we said sure and went for a walk.
We headed back to Carlo's Barber Shop at 12:45. There were two guys there cutting hair. One guy had a moptop and the other had a nice short hair style. So when I got the guy with the short hair as my barber I typed into Google Translate "Can you cut my hair to look like yours?" Si Si Si! he responded.
Tara and Joan sat and watched as he gave me a wash a cut, another wash and another cut. All I could hear them saying was
"He's an artiste."
"I wonder if he'd do our hair?"
"Maybe he'd come to NY"
He asked us where we were from and seemed genuinely excited when we said New York City. (though not enough to say he'd come and visit.) He also said he didn't do ladies hair. But my wife and mother in law was so impressed by the job he did, they didn't bother giving him any instructions for Timmy's hair. "Just let him do his thing" Joan said. "You don't mess with a good thing."
Both our cuts came to 63 Euro, which is a bit more than we usually pay, but I usually don't get two washes and a shave, so it was worth it. It felt great, and if I didn't look like a stud, I felt like one.
We went next door for lunch and I let the waiter choose what I ordered. I mean you couldn't really go wrong. Needless to say it was delicious. Timmy ordered a chesseburger, which reminded me of the time I took the poor thing to Langan's and he ordered a pizza. But in fairness to him, the burger was really tasty too.
When we went back outside after lunch, we noticed a lot of the places were closed, including Carlo's barber shop. It was siesta time in Sicily. More than one sign read Hours 9AM-1PM and 4PM-9PM. Can you imagine getting a 3 hour lunch break? Shoot at my job, they just increased our to an hour from 45 minutes.
Tuesday was a very relaxing day, the first day I felt really good and could also really explore the city.
Sunday I was still wiped out and Monday was the wedding. The cut and shave felt great, lunch was off the charts, the weather was perfect (a tad overcast so the sun wasn't beating down on you) and no time constraints. Really a perfect day.
Back at the house I started flipping around on the TV, which was pretty useless being that the majority of the stations were in Italian, but I did find some English speaking news channels. Al-Jazeera, interestingly enough was one of them, the BBC was another. Then there was TRT, which was all over the Paul Manafort guilty verdict. So that was the station I stuck with. They also spent a ton of time talking about Trump's feud with Turkish President Erdogan. I thought that was kind of odd, I mean I hadn't heard much about any issues between Captain Orange and the Turks. It was pretty far down on the list of folks he's pissed off, (CNN and the NFL were at the top). Turns out this TRT was an Istanbul based English speaking news network. There was only so much news out of Turkey I was interested in, but like I said, they had good coverage of the verdict in the Manafort trial, so that's what I went with.
Back at the turn of the century, I took trips with the Ace three years in a row. In 1999, we went to Baltimore, Philly and Atlantic City, catching the Orioles, Phillies and some gambling. The next year we went to Toronto to see the Jays and the Hockey Hall of Fame. In 2001, we went to New Orleans, which was notable for the amount of boozing we did and the George Carlin airplane jokes we were cracking while waiting to board the plane (get on the plane, get on the plane, f-ck you I'm getting IN the plane) Jokes that a month later would have landed us at Guantanamo Bay.
New Orleans we pretty much drank the whole time, but the other two trips, Monday was our designated drinking day. In Philadelphia, we convinced the bartender to keep the bar open till 3 instead of 2 when he was supposed to close. (I haven't had this good a time on Monday night ever he told us) In Toronto, we ended up getting faced, and when we woke up the next morning, we had a table full of Chinese food we bought and never ate.
Since I didn't drink much at the wedding, I designated Tuesday as my drinking night. The beer selection in Sicily wasn't enticing, so I ended up drinking red wine. It did the trick, it mellowed me out and made me feel like I was on vacation.
WEDNESDAY AUGUST 22-CEFALU
Time to go back to the beach.
This time, I was determined to be Super Uncle to Connor and Finley as well as Super Dad to Tim. Tim had been saving money all summer and decided to treat us dudes to a paddle boat.
Again, the Tyrrhenian Sea didn't really have waves or rip currents, so you could rent a paddle boat and go 300 yards out and still be safe. Brian is an Annapolis graduate and it was a good thing too because I had the bright idea to let Timmy and Connor paddle while Brian and I sat in the back relaxing. But of course that would have led to the paddle boat making like the Titanic, so Tim and I paddled out.
Then we took turns diving into the water. Absolutely brilliant.
We paddled back in and hung out on the beach for a while. And here is what I will take away from the beaches of Sicily.
There weren't any swimsuit models here, (not that I was looking mind you)
There were however, a bunch of old guys wearing Speedos. I've been around a long time and I still have never heard any woman say "Hey, that guy looks great in a Speedo." I wouldn't be caught dead in one to be honest with you.
Another issue was that there was a ton of smoking going on. I forgot with all the anti-smoking laws in NY how much people smoke in the world. It really was like a giant ashtray. I hadn't second hand smoked that much since Shelley's closed down.
The other thing was, the beach wasn't that big. It was nice, don't get me wrong, but small. And they squeezed a whole bunch of folks on there.
We went for a walk after the paddle boat. Kerry found a nice outdoor restaurant about a 1/4 mile away from where we were sitting on the beach. They had a Peppa Pig Pizza, which the kids loved. This was the good stuff folks, Sicilian pizza in Sicily. This was living.
The waitress was awesome too. I have to say, the people here in Sicily could not have been nicer, and if you told them you were from NY, they didn't look at you like you were working for al-Qaeda. This waitress got really excited and she even posed for a few pics with the kids.
At the end of the block where this place was, there was a rock formation that over looked the beach. Check this out.
We went back for another swim at the beach. Then we headed back to the villa. We were about to have the best dinner ever.
Angelo brought two cooks with him and the three of them prepared a dinner for the ages for us.
Bruschetta with sardines, eggplant (by far the best I ever tasted) and for dinner a seafood pasta. Followed by a homemade cake for dessert.
Sicilian cuisine is very interesting. It's light on beef and heavy on seafood. Ed (Auggie) DePuy once told me he never orders seafood unless he can see the water from the restaurant, well as you can see from my photos, there's pretty much water everywhere.
This was out last full day in Sicily. We'd be leaving first thing in the morning.
It would be literally and figuratively the longest day.
Next: The Voyage Home:
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