Sicily day two - Palermo to Enna

03/07/09 - Palermo to Enna

We were up bright and early on our first full day in Sicily, heading back to the airport to pick up our hire car. We hit the jackpot on the model of car we hired and soon were crawling back through the Palermo traffic in a 2 week old white Fiat 500 with a mere 900km on the clock.

I started to think I'd made a grave error bottling it at the rental desk.
'Would you like super insurance? A bargain at 160 Euros'.
'But it's only 150 Euros to hire the car'
'With an 800 Euro excess on the insurance for damage, 1600 Euros for theft'
(shoots quick look at nervous looking girlfriend/driver) 'err.....yeah. Go on then'

Yet here we were, 5 abreast across the 3 lane motorway, J transformed into a demon behind the wheel, steering our wee car expertly through the mayhem. The general rule of thumb seems to be "see a space and put your car in it before someone else does". The white lines have faded almost into oblivion and it appears that there is no real rush to repaint them, as this only confuses matters. Somehow, it works.

Soon, with the help of our at-that-point-trusty-sat-nav, Heather, we were on the motorway heading to the interior. We were booked in to spend a night at a farm house in near Enna, a medieval (or older) town clinging to a rock in the middle of the highlands and the centre of the island. The main roads are excellent and pretty empty, and for some reason I never quite established almost exclusively raised on pylons about 50 feet above the ground. I guess it's either to prevent the government having to buy the farmers' land off them to construct the road (as they can still access it beneath the overhead road) or it's some kind of earthquake protection. Either way, it feels a little like you've been transported into the future and are travelling in your hover car through the Sicilian countryside. It did at the time anyway - I should mention we only discovered that the car had air conditioning after around an hour, and prior to that I was imitating a german shepherd (i.e. the dog, not just a shepherd from Germany) with my head / tongue lolling out the window in a desperate attempt to cool down.

First sight of Enna is pretty awe-inspiring. It clings to a rock which rises out of the surrounding land and resembles a medieval fortress. You can see why various armies took years trying to invade it; you can almost taste the history. It would appear, however, that those town planners 1000 years ago never stopped to think that one day a small hatchback car would be invented and may wish to drive around the city streets.

This should have been the lesson we needed to disregard the sat nav, or at the very least pay equal attention to where it was sending us rather than blindly following it. We should also have learnt that aiming for the 'nearest town' to our accomodation doesn't work somewhere like Sicily.

Technology has succeeded in exactly replicating a human's map reading prowess. Unfortunately, Heather is the exact replicant of someone who is utterly pish at it. Navigon, the manufacturers, proudly state that they use the same maps as Garmin. That's a bit like giving two people the same road atlas and expecting them both to choose the best route to a destination. The poor dear got horribly confused, sending us up streets barely wide enough for our tiny car, telling us to drive through no entry signs and finally, taking us down an alley too narrow to turn round in and commanding us to 'go straight on' - through a saftey barrier and down the set of steps on the other side. J, stunning me at every turn with her driving prowess and potty mouth, finally had enough and demanded we shut Heather the hell up - lo and behold our new tactic of using our eyes to find the nearest main road worked a treat and after what we thought would be the most stressful driving experience of the trip we were heading back down the mountain in search of our farm.

We paused only long enough to stop an take a photo or two of the town across the valley - when in a moment of karma my foot got caught in Heather's lead and off she went, flying from the windscreen, out the door and across the road. She turned back on again, but the tension in the atmosphere was palpable as we drove off again. We were angry with her for getting us lost; she now bore a grudge for what she obviously felt was an overly aggressive response from me. Without a road atlas, we were going to be in for a tense tour.