To Sicily!

Saturday 6th October

This will be a short description of our day, as it was rather dull and mostly spent in airports. There are no photographs. Paul took some out of the plane window, but they are completely hopeless. Nobody had washed the windows recently, and they were far too dirty and scratched to take any photos through them.

We drove to Heathrow, where we had booked a place to park. We normally travel to the airport by public transport, but the weekend was full of engineering works and transport would have been very difficult. There was no train from Oxted for a start, and many of the Tube lines weren't running either, so it would have been a bit of a marathon, humping suitcases in and out of buses and up and down flights of stairs, and would probably have taken hours.

Instead of which, we drove for about 55 minutes, left our car at reception for somebody else to park, had our cases put into a purple trailer by a very nice man, who then drove us (and two other people) to Terminal 4. All much more comfortable.

After security, we had time to buy a sandwich for lunch (there is no food on Alitalia short flights) and had a short wait, part of which I spent in a bookshop, and part of which I spent downloading an e-book from Amazon which was cheaper than the paperback I saw in the shop. More importantly, it saves me adding yet more weight to my baggage by carrying books.

The rest of the time I spent getting this blog up to date. I had hoped to be able to post my last entry in the airport, but there was no free Wi-Fi! We had become so used to free airport Wi-Fi when travelling round the world, it came as a nasty shock to find there was none at Heathrow - or at least, not at Terminal 4.

The flight to Rome was only two hours, and both of us slept a bit - we had followed our usual procedure of cramming too much into our last day before the holiday, and as a consequence not starting the packing until too late, so we weren't in bed until after nearly 3 am. As the alarm went at 7.30, it was a very short night.

The landing in Rome was quite amazing; the plane came down as softly as a feather, in fact I only realised we had landed when I saw the buildings rolling past the window. Everybody was amazed - in fact the whole plane burst into spontaneous applause, something I have never known happen before.

Most of our time in Rome airport was spent walking; our plane from London arrived at one end of the airport, and the plane to Catania left from the other end. Rome is not a small airport. It was a 45 minute walk (though some time was spent queueing at security and then at passport control). It was all a bit of a rush, as we arrived in the terminal at 4pm and boarding for Catania was at 4.45 - we only just arrived in time. I had hoped to have time to buy a local SIM for the iPad, and there were phone shops on our route through the terminal but we had no time to stop.

The flight to Catania was only 55 minutes, so there was only really time to type these few paragraphs and to drink a glass of water before it was time to switch off the technology ready for landing.

We were met at the airport and taken to our hotel in Siracusa, about an hour's drive away, where we had dinner. Tomorrow we start on the ruins of of Syracuse.