Saturday, October 23

At sea. The big excitement today was sailing through the Straits of Messina ( location of the sea monsters of legend, Scilla and Charderis, although I’ve probably spelled at least one of those names wrong). Then we sailed around the island of Stromboli in the Aeolian Islands. Stromboli is an active volcano, continuously venting gases which makes for a lovely plume above the peak. I did take photos, but can’t upload any because I’ve already packed the USB cable for my camera. Sorry.

Packing was the exercise of the day. Gack. The single, solitary good thing about packing to go home is that you don’t have to make decisions about what to put in the suitcase...just keep stuffing things in untll all the closets, drawers and shelves are empty.

Tomorrow we are off to Rome for the day and night. We hope that we can arrange some sort of city tour for tomorrow afternoon. Then on Monday it’s back to the States and home for Jill and Houston for me. It’s been a really great trip to see lots of places I never expected to be able to see. Still, however, seeing the pyramids at Giza is the high point of the trip for me.

Ciao for now.