We had a direct flight from Montreal to Catania, so we actually managed to get a few hours of sleep. Not exactly a full night’s worth, but pretty good, as these things go. Still, our plans for the day didn’t go beyond getting ourselves set up with the rental car, phones, and the lay of the land around the hotel. The car was the easy part … once we found the rental car parking lot, which was a lot harder than we expected. But the car is nice, and more to the point, small, which will be a plus for Italian roads.

Navigating the roads with jet lag was … fun. And then there was the parking. The hotel doesn’t have dedicated parking, so you need to find street parking. This was challenging. Even paid parking was impossible to find.

Amazingly, we stayed in good spirits and finally found one, very tight spot in time for lunch. Unfortunately it was over a kilometer from the hotel. But it was a spot, so we took it, and then tried to figure out how the paid parking works. Once that was sorted (again, much harder than expected) we had lunch, and then went to check into the hotel. We were prepared to double park while Jan lugged our luggage into the hotel, but fortune smiled and we found a spot literally across the street from the hotel. After getting settled, we went for a stroll to look around the local area and check out restaurants. The car stayed in that precious parking spot.

It was lovely today, in the mid twenties Celsius and with the sun we were quite warm. We treated ourselves to flavoured ices and enjoyed a quiet moment in a small park.

We are very close to the Villa Bellini. We just walked past it today, but will likely explore further later this week.

We will also focus on the architecture later this week, but today I was mostly enjoying the warm weather and clear blue skies. And trying to stay awake, of course.

Our apartment has a small private terrace, so we enjoyed a glass of rose wine from the Etna vineyards with a light snack. We were fading.

I’ll close with the skyline after sunset.