Today we finished our drive to Sicily. We decided to get an early start on the drive as we had 300 kilometers to cover today. The drive south was very easy and we made good time. We arrived at the ferry terminal about 12:30. As we were entering the ferry terminal I saw a sign that said ferries to Messina and pulled in there. I was immediately directed to a spot in a staging area, and told by the guy to go in and buy my ticket in the office. Things were going exceptionally efficiently, so I was nervous.
We were loaded and underway about 30 minutes after we arrived so again things were going great. We had taken the ferry the other way from downtown Messina in 2019 and I remember the trip was very quick, maybe 20 minutes. Right after we were underway I noticed we were not going directly across but heading south. It turns out we had boarded a ferry that went to a secondary terminal south of downtown Messina. Instead of taking 20 minutes it took 45 minutes. But, it was a nice day for a boat ride and when we arrived we were on the freeway within 1km without dealing with the traffic in the center of Messina.
We had booked ourselves into an agritourismo near Messina which was highly rated on park4night our go to app for finding places to stay. I had been corresponding with the owner since yesterday. In Europe I only use GPS coordinates to route ourselves. Addresses are frequently not in Greta Garmin’s data base, so the best thing is to use GPS coordinates, but they have to be manually entered in Greta. We were going along happily when we came to a toll booth. I saw a sign for credit cards and pulled into that one. The machine asked for a ticket (it actually asked for a biglietto) which we didn’t have, so I stuck a credit card in, and the gate went up. But we had unknowingly picked the toll booth for the exit ramp, so we were into a small town before we knew it. The next 2.5 km’s included a lot of narrow road driving that frequently had Ton wincing as we just cleared vehicles with 5 or 6 inches to spare. We finally got back on the freeway, and were driving merrily along when I happened to notice that the purple line that marked our route was heading out to sea. I pulled into a gas station and while we were filling up I checked the GPS coordinates I had put in and one of the digits was wrong so Greta was directing us to a point about 4 or 5 miles into the Mediterranean. I usually double check my entries but must have forgot to last night as one misplaced number can have you trying to navigate in the sea. I corrected the error and we ended back in the same little town we had squeezed thru before, but this time it was our destination.
Agritourismos in Italy are farms that allow people to camp or stay on site. They range from very posh to pretty rustic. This one is pretty urban and high tech, but we are parked in a field of tomatoes and mango trees and we were told to help ourselves. We also have the place to ourselves with a nice private bathroom. Right after we arrived Ton was out picking tomatoes with abandon, and I found three mangos. We had both for dinner and they are good.