The Life and Travels of Sherckle: Catania, Sicily: Reconnecting Families!

Joe, Simon, Dick, MJ

Yesterday was a travel day...for Dick & I it was an early morning flight from Paris to Rome. During our time in Paris I managed to decipher many of the French words .....despite my notoriously poor grades in high school French....but the check-in machines at the airport were another story. (I think this experience was Dick Bartholomew's secret way of getting back at me for not studying well enough to get decent grades way back when! He was my high school teacher who often shook his head at my lack of effort back ...) Yes, you could push the buttons to translate to English but making sure you were at the right machine in the right portion of the terminal was really the challenge! Thankfully Air France has some exceptionally nice employees who graciously steered us in the direction of the right machines!

At any rate, we took the two-hour flight from Paris to Rome and hooked up with MJ & Joe, and friends, Fran & John. They had flown all night from Washington, DC, and arrived, as everyone does after such a long flight, exhausted and bedraggled! But no rest for the weary because it was time for another flight to Catania, Sicily... Luckily we had made arrangements for "Simon" to pick us up from the airport and transport us to Hotel Una in downtown Catania. (This is the only standard type of hotel that we will be staying at during this trip... We can figure out when the trip is over whether this has been a good decision or not, but so far we have been really pleased with the private apartment rentals arranged through Air B&B).

Weary Travelers

Figuring out how to unlock the door

Fast forward a couple of hours... My brother and his wife live in Catania, as do Joe's cousins. We had asked them to meet us last evening at the hotel and being the good drinkers we are we ended up meeting one another at the rooftop bar... It was a delightful gathering that was really unplanned. We got to meet Joe's family; they got to meet mine. Fran & John got to meet everybody! Some spoke the old Catania dialect which is apparently very different from Italian; some did not. So we spent the evening reconnecting, nodding, smiling, talking with our hands and saying "si, si" ..and drinking!