One of the main things in our lives that we do not write about in this blog is Potluck, which tends to happen once a week. It happens at home, or at least close to home, which is why you never find it in our travel blog.
Except now we are combing our home life with our travel life in rural Sicily. We have packed up Potluck staples Karen and Tom Palmer and traveled here to visit original Potluck co-founding family Chris and Wendy Brooks in their lovely European headquarters.
In fact, we haven’t seen Chris and Wendy for quite some time because they have been preparing this place for us. It should also be noted that if not for schduling conflicts we may well have the remaining club members, Michael and Carla, along with us.
But they went to London last week instead, and now they are missing out.
What are they missing out on? Well…
We had a totally comfortable and not-at-all stressful succession of flights from Boston to Munich to Catania, one of the larger cities on Sicily. It was marred only when Karen’s suitcase failed to come out onto the baggage carousel. Lufthansa’s miscue ate up a little of our first day, and caused Karen a wee bit of stress, but managed to pick it up later in the day because…
We took a few hours to hike around on Mount Etna, which towers over Catania, is still topped with a frosting of snow, and is an active volcano! We drove up to where the snow starts and where a ski resort operates for at least part of the year. While there are slaloming trails visible in the remaining snow, it looks like the ski resort has shut down for the spring. Some people were sledding on the lower patches, but most people were hiking around the non-snowy parts or even taking atv tours. We chose a short walk around a crater that was created by eruptions 1892 and looked over a lava fields from various eruptions, some starting to show vegetation growing on them, and some still new enough to be completely black. We also had a sweeping view of the city of Catania and the ocean beyond it.
It was chilly up on the mountainside — we were at about 6,200 feet in altitude — and we retreated into a cafe near the parking lot to warm up. Here, we got to try this trip’s first Italian delicacy (the first of many, we expect) — arancini. These are fried rice balls with meat and cheese in the middle. The Sicilian version (we are learning there is a Sicilian version of a lot of things), is not round, but pointed at the top in homage to pointy-topped Mount Etna.
As we were riding back down the mountain back into Catania, we decided to check in at the airport to relay a suitable address for the airline to deliver Karen’s suitcase, should it ever be located. Chris and Wendy’s address was deemed not suitable for reasons we’ll see a little later. It turns out that they had managed to locate Karen’s suitcase and it was waiting for her at the airport when she checked in. What good news!
The only bad news was that all this driving up and down hills was making me carsick. This did not improve as we neared the Brooks’ home in a lovely city called Mussomeli in the Sicilian hill country. There was really nothing to be done. In order for us to get to our destination, we had to get through a tapestry of curves and switchbacks. Mussomeli was visible on its hillside for quite a while, but for much of the drive it did not seem to be getting any closer.
We did finally make it into town and got into our new accommodations. I recovered significanly once I got out of the car and saw the place. I even helped Chris walk the two local celebrities, the Brooks’ Newfoundlands Pippa and Arlo, though the narrow, winding cobblestone alleys of their neighborhood in the heart of Mussomeli’s historic s old district. Then I fell asleep pretty much as soon as I lay down in bed because it had been such a long day. Any lingering feeling of carsickness melted away overnight and was completel obliterated when I got up the next morning to see…
The lovely expanse of Sicilian countryside visible from Chris and Wendy’s sunroom. It beckoned us to explore, which we did for most of our first full day in town. Everywhere we walked in Mussomeli, people would call out to Wendy and ask where the dogs were. We got to meet many of Brooks’ new friends and neighbors and wander even more of the cobblestone streets.
We even got to take in the city’s the first ever auto race! The race cars had been parked along the main road the day before so Chris and Wendy looked into it and found some times when the cars would likely be zooming by. We were among a small crowd at the finish line and got to see several of the cars — all hatchbacks — navigate a traffic cone s-curve and then sprint up the hill to the end of the race. It was not something we had imagined we would get to see.
After seeing seven or eight cars finish the race, we contined our wanderings through town, taking in urban wildflowers and periodic vews of the farmland on the facing hillside. We made it to the dramatic Castle Manfredonico, which wraps itself around a giant pillar of craggy rock just outside of town. It was closed today, but we took the initiative to try to hike around the base of the stony island it sits on. At this point, it is not actually clear to us if there is a trail that goes all the way around it. We found a trail, but among the few thing we became certain about were that it puts you in close proximity to a lot of thorny thistle, and there is a random mud patch that took us all by surprise and muddied us up considerably. We abandoned our circumnavigation not long after the mud.
Still, there was more excitement to come. We saw two motorcyclists escape hot pursuit by the Carabinieri. We had a nice aperitivo on the sun porch. We played extensively with the two tiny kittens Chris and Wendy adopted just in time for our visit.
And we finished the evening in the most appropriate way possible: a potluck dinner thrown by some of Wendy’s friends in the old town’s main square.
