A Travel Day

Images: The Bus
A Travel Day
First you must appreciate the immensity of the Bus. I do not think that "Quattro" and "Quattordieci" sound all that much alike, but I confess to still working on my Italian. Perhaps the gentleman who lost our reservation for a mid-sized station wagon and decided to "upgrade" us to a van thought we needed room for fourteen, not four.
Apart from the transport trucks, we have yet to see anything as big as our bus. We regularly fold both mirrors in and inch our way down streets, with a finger-width on either side.
Today we left the Hotel Olympia in Salerno to drive to Sicily.
I think we have mastered the navigation of the roads, but it is hard to describe the journey that we undertook.
On a PAY road, a TOLL road, we were warned that there was construction and that the trip would take longer than we expected. The construction was the whole length of the motorway – all 450 km of it. Apparently this construction has been underway for twenty years. When we pondered why they wouldn't just take a measly 100km and get that finished, then move on to another section, K's response was, …... wait for it......“No wonder they lost the bloody war...” The 450km took us over 9 hours.
Upon arrival in Sicily, we were to phone our contact, who would take us to our house in Cuballino.
We didn't have a cell phone, so we stopped to use the pay phone. We could not find a pay phone that took real money, and finally figured out that you have to buy a phone card.
So – we went to where the big sign said “Phone Cards for Sale” in English no less. But you guessed it, the young lady informed us that no one sells phone cards anymore. When I asked how they used the pay phones (which looked fairly new) she just shrugged. When I asked WHY they had pay phones if no one could use them, she shrugged again.
A lady who was listening then handed us her cell phone and insisted we make the call on her phone. She refused even a cup of expresso for her kindness. Molto gentile!
We arrived well after dark at Cuballino, which we NEVER would have found on our own, and collapsed, exhausted into a deep sleep, from which we awoke to our first day of sunshine under the beautiful Sicilian sky, with Etna looking sternly down on us from her majestic throne.