Aug 30 - change of plans, somewhat

We did laundry, which is always an adventure.  Quite a walk from our hotel, it took quizzing a few people to find that lavandria / laundromat which turned out to be in the next town over, perhaps a 1/2 hour walk up, up, up ...

We didn't have change.  The attendants said, ok, pay us later.  I assumed that the couple running the place are the owners.  They were doing hotel laundry, or we assumed so.  No one personally has that many sheets !  We eventually went out for a walk and found a little grocery store who gave us change from our purchase of two frizzante waters.  She was reluctant to give 18 Euros change for 2x1 Euros bottles of water, but she eventually reached into her bra and pulled out a wad of bills ... hey, what can I say ?

Laundry done, we headed back to the hotel and spread it out on the bedspread to eliminate any residual dampness.  We then headed for the square where we intended to catch the hop-on-hop-off bus to the beach but found that it would be another 1.75 hours before it would be there.  Being almost lunch time, but not quite, we walked 100 meters and had a glass of wine ... hey, it was already after noon !  Deciding to abandon the plan to hit the beach that afternoon, we walked some more and found a place for lunch.  I had the first green salad that I've had in a couple of weeks; Sandy had the insalata de mara (seafood salad).  My mouth is finally healed enough to munch on those greens and put up with the acidic dressing.  Yay !

We wandered back to the hotel and booked something for tomorrow night.  We don't have a heavy driving schedule tomorrow, basically getting out of here and heading up Mt. Etna, seeing where that takes us.  After we do whatever we do on Mt. Etna, we'll head down to the water for our booking at Syracuse, Sicily.

We've had some fun with parking.  Our criteria includes parking but it's not always actually available, in spite of what the hotel says to booking.com.  Wifi is something else that's dicey.  Common areas ?  Rooms ?  All rooms ?  We really want wifi in the room, useable wifi.  Twice we've had to change rooms to make that happen.  It's not a big deal to change rooms if we do our due diligence right away, i.e. turn on a device and see if we can connect.  Generally that works although the last hotel's wifi worked fine for the ipad and iphones, but not my laptop.  If it's only a one-night stay that's no big deal; in fact, I don't mind if I can only use the laptop in public areas.

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Dinner on the street again.  Every restaurant has street / stair sitting and it's fun watching the people go by.  It's much more dressed up here due to the large number of international tourists.  It will be interesting to see how things progress. 

We checked with Sara to see if we could Facetime with Emma but that didn't pan out.  Then it got late and the lights turned out ...

Onward !