Thursday, September 6, 2018

Terrasini and Cinisi August 21st

Tuesday morning we woke up and got all our bags packed because we had arranged to stay at a different location Tuesday evening prior to our early departure on Wednesday. So we took the hour train ride from Cefalu to Palermo Tuesday morning. It was kind of a mess getting everything packed into the bags but we were going to check both bags so we just need to organize what would go where for the long flight the next day. We left fairly early so that we could take our time walking to the train station which was about a 15 minute walk. Kyle did not enjoy pulling the luggage down cobblestone Streaks.


When we got to the train station we saw my cousin Nicky and we all took the train together, it was really fun to get one last visit in with him although he was utterly exhausted because they got back even later from the wedding and went down to the beach. We had a coffee at the train cafe before getting on.


Once we got off the train in Palermo we located the bus station to get a bus to Terrasini. We had been in touch with the lady of the Airbnb we were staying at who gave us directions and had stated to take the bus toward this town but to get off at a linguistic high school. I had mentioned it to the bus driver who at first was not sure what I was talking about but after a few more tries he understood. The bus was a nice little tour of Palermo and we got to go over by the water and see some boats and see some statues.

We had a little time at the bus station waiting for the bus so we used this time to eat through some of the snacks we had in our bags and to just chill out for a bit. 















Thomas took a little snooze on the bus as did I because it was about an hour or so drive out to where the airport was in this town that we are staying at.



We chose this Airbnb because it was as close to the airport as we could get. Even though the airport was a Palermo airport it was not really near the city of Palermo. When we arrived in Terrasini at our drop off that the driver so kindly dropped us off at we were a bit lost.  This was where we were dropped:




The map on our phone did not load because I forgot to load it when I had Wi-Fi so being off of Wi-Fi I had nothing to help us. Kyle walked in one direction to see if you could find the road that we were looking for per the owners instructions the drop off was only a few blocks away from her street but we had to figure out where the street was first. After Kyle came back from walking one way I decided to walk the other and saw a bakery so I went into the bakery to chat with the two women workers. Neither of them spoke any English so it was pretty humorous trying to communicate what I needed. They appear very concerned that I did not have a car and I was trying to get to this address while wearing a baby on foot. They ended up asking these two delivery truck guys for some help as well. They all appeared very concerned that I was lost and not anywhere near the address I was giving them but I knew that we had to be close because this is where the owner had stated to get off the bus. They were able to load up the address on their map and we could see that it was just a few streets down so I thanked them and bought a couple of cookies and we hauled our luggage down the road.

It was still a hot and tiring walk as we approached this desolate location. It ended up being a very nice tuck-away Airbnb on a beautiful piece of land but my was it a pain in the ass to get to.

As we were walking down the road before entering the gate the owner was driving out and he saw us so he loaded up our big bag into his car which our big bag was basically the size of his car. And he came back to the house and helped us with the check in process.




We were up on the second floor of a beautiful upstairs living area with a porch and couch. We sat down on the couch and realized it had been a long time since we had sat on the couch. The other Airbnb had a very hard bed and two chairs that we had sat in but honestly over the prior days we hadn’t done a whole lot of sitting besides a cramped transportation vehicle with the baby strapped to me. We took some time to relax and let Thomas rome. The porch had some sand toys and it was a perfect space for Thomas to do his thing without getting into much. We knew that we wanted to get to bed early so we decided to walk into the city to explore a little bit of the area.


We took a little tour around the property before walking to the town.


I needed a break from baby wearing so Kyle wore Thomas, we walked the short path of the property to explore a little bit discovering a lime tree and some other pretty things. Then we walked the half mile or so into town. The outskirts of town were very run down and fairly trashy. They almost looked dilapidated and abandoned. Not quite as bad as parts of Palermo that we saw but still not very attractive. Once we made it into the middle of Terrasini they also had a Piazza Duomo in the middle of town and it looked a lot like Cefalu. Except a lot less busy. We had hit the time of day were everything was closed again so we just walked down to the water where there was an amazing view of the clearwater is a less crowded beach and mountain views in the distance. 






I like the stone awning over the windows, how the plaster pieces are formed to make a covering.





Clocked from our AirBnB the beach was 1.8km's walk away.








This was a Natural History Museum. We debating going in and said if it was less than five euro we would otherwise we were too tired and it wasn't worth it. I think it was six euro each. 


This sky looked almost fake with how blue and cloudy it was. Oh before we went for a walk when we were sitting in the porch we were hearing lots of thunder but it didn’t look like it was gonna rain in that area.




We were debating on food but decided just to get a brioche con gelato off of the plaza and then go get pizza later. Even though most everything closes in the afternoon gelato cafés are usually the only thing open. We sat down and enjoyed our gelato sandwiches while using the free Wi-Fi in the café before walking back.


On our walk back we discovered a one euro store and decided to go in, it smelled just like the dollar stores in America. Must be the made in China plastic. There wasn’t really anything of interest in there but we did stop at a supermarket down the road to pick up some coffee for a family souvenir. We continued on toward our house because the pizza place was on the other side. It was pretty warm and our feet were hurting. We had looked up the pizza place earlier and saw that it opened at six.





Pomegranate tree!



Pear tree!

That's our road! The pizza place was 750m from where our AirBnB was (on the OTHER side of the town we had just walked to)
 
Not really an exciting view on the other side of town, busy street, grown over sidewalks. 

Everything is so small in Europe, even the construction trucks! haha here was a tow truck. 

The pizza place was by the train station which looked completely deserted and run down. It look like nobody ever uses this train station and I would have thought that but while we are standing there we saw train come through but nobody got on and nobody got off. 

We went over to the pizza place where it was clear they were not open as they were setting up all the tables and then they explained to us that they opened at seven not six. We had to verify this a few times because we forgot our Italian book and we weren’t sure if she was saying six or seven since six is "sei" and seven is "sette". And she held up her fingers but she held them up with the thumb and forefinger so kind of looked like six so it was about a five minute conversation because of the language barrier. We sat down and I nursed Thomas while we decided if we should go back to the apartment or wait for the pizza place to open or walk down the road to find another place to eat.

We decided to walk down the road although it was a very busy road and it took us about five minutes to get across it because there was so much traffic. Then we get to another pizza place and they also did not open till seven. But we are so tired that we sat down and had some water while the waitress googled over Thomas. Everyone loved Thomas, everywhere we would go the wait staff would seem rude until they saw the baby and then they would melt. After we had our water we decided to just go home to rest for a little bit and then go back after seven when things opened. The thing was we were just so tired and we wanted to go to bed but we knew that we needed to eat before hand because we would be waking up early for an early flight.

We went home and kicked our feet up until 7 o’clock then we headed back to the train station pizza place. Oh we did open up our wine from Lipari since we didn't want to mess with packing it or trying to get it home. It was super sweet!


At this point we were getting pretty tired of dealing with rude waiters and waitresses and a menu that didn’t make sense. They had a pizza menu of like 65 pizzas but the first one I pointed out was "not a pizza" even though it was listed under the pizzas.

Thomas's face pretty much sums up how we felt at this point:


We ate our food, great pizza just shitty service, then headed back home in the dark. We wanted to shower and get our bags all ready to go for the 5:00am departure.

Oh I had to share this photo of our trash process at the AirBnB. Great that they sort trash like we do in Minneapolis, lol. 


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