Jane and Kristi in Wales and Italy 2019: Valle dei Templi and Taormina (May 30)

We spent a leisurely morning drinking Italian press coffee on our apartment terrace overlooking a lovely beach and the Mediterranean Sea (watched an old man walk along the beach doing his calisthenics--arm circles and stretches and the like...I might do more stretches and mobility exercises if I had a beach to do them on). Then we headed over to visit nearby Valley of the Temples: (mostly) Greek and Roman ruins across the length of the top of an impressive hill overlooking the sea.

After that, we drove across the middle of Sicily to arrive late afternoon at Taormina, a lovely coastal town that has just about everything: beach, mountain, castle, greco-roman ruin, gondola, an impossibly narrow and unending spiral drive into a main parking garage, Venice-like feel with its meandering streets (except not at all flat....the city is built into the mountainside, and there are more steps than a fitbit can count)...oh, and an Oh-so-active volcano. Our host at B&B Tauremenion, Giuseppe (Pepe) is a early thirty-something guy who, after studying literature at college in Catania, took a leap of faith and, with his cousin (and their family savings), bought a run-down building in Taormina with a lot of promise (and an amazing rooftop terrace and sea view), renovated it and now run it.