Happy Birthday!

At dinner on the 19^th my Dad asked me where I thought I would be on my 25^th birthday. 

This was the dessert I got after a great dinner at Astemio.  It was some sort of vanilla mouse with chocolate syrup drizzled all over it, apparently special to Sicily.  As was the glass of wine sitting there too.

I was never one for planning my life out and haven’t really figured out where I want to be so I said I hadn’t really thought of it.  It was a pleasant surprise that I spent my 25^th birthday in Sicily, at the base of Mt. Etna sailing around the Mediterranean Sea with my Dad.  Far from expectations, but it also exceeds any expectations I may have had.

I had a great birthday.  I got to talk to my family and friends, some who I haven’t had the chance to since I’ve been sailing, and watched a great video that my boyfriend, Bryan, put together for me with the help of some of my best friends.  It was a great getting to see so many familiar faces from the states. 

 This is the YouTube link to the movie Bryan made.

Dad and I celebrated the night before with a wonderful dinner and an Italian ska concert held right in the middle of the piazza in front of a beautiful church. 

I was overwhelmed with how many birthday wishes I received on Facebook, and how many of them wished me good sailing and said they were following my adventure.  That extra reminder of home was just what I needed as the icing on the cake to make it a terrific birthday.

Thanks everyone!

At least I still have fingers...

I can officially check Sicily off of my list of places to visit.  I have been saying we are visiting Reposo, but I was mistaken and it’s Reposto.  A town located at the base of Mt. Etna, one of Italy’s biggest active volcanoes, and that is practically untouched by tourism.  A brand new marina was built with hopes of bringing more tourists in, but with its high prices, and undeveloped area, it’s still a place that people stop at on the way somewhere else. 

This is a clear view of Mt. Etna from the bow of our boat through the marina.  The clouds cleared for about 2 hours and then covered it up again.

I had my first real injury during the docking at Porta dell Etna.  Everything was going really well, there were two people there to help us dock and we got the bow line without a hitch and I was going to cleat it and my 3 middle fingers got caught between the cleat and the docking line.  Not good.  For anyone not familiar with sailing the cleat is the piece of metal attached to the boat where lines are tied and held in place.  Once a line is cleated, it isn’t going anywhere and can hold a massive amount of force and pressure, from sails, docking lines, or anything else you can tie to it.  What I figured happened was I was pulling the line to keep the boat from going backwards, that is its purpose.  When the line started pulling me I wanted to wrap it once around the cleat to relieve some of the pressure and get more leverage.  I must have pulled with my left hand which was on top and wrapped it around not realizing my right hand was still close enough to get tangled.  The boat pulled back and the line pulled forward and my eyes started to water.  I luckily was able to use my body weight and my left hand to create enough slack to pull my throbbing fingers out.  The pain much resembled slamming your fingers in a car door.  You never quite know how it happened, you feel foolish after it happens, and it hurts like hell during and after.  Nothing was broken or bleeding so I was really lucky there and aside from some swelling and a little blood blister I got off super lucky.  The swelling was taken care of my Captain Wayno with an ibuprofen and wrapping my hand around a cold beer.  We had a talk about what went wrong and chalked it up to a very fortunate learning event that could’ve ended very badly.

We checked in and what was supposed to be a €50 night stay was actually a €90 night stay plus we had to pay for power and water if we wanted it.  Conflicted between wanting a day to relax and recharge/fix things before heading out to sea for 3 days and the expensive docking fees, we decided to leave it in the hands of the weather.  This was the 19^th and my birthday is on the 20^th.  I asked Dad to go out to dinner for my birthday and since we weren’t sure if we would be in port, and because most restaurants are closed Monday night, we went into town in search of a restaurant.  We stumbled across, with the help of some lovely old men hanging out on the street, Astemio.  I couldn’t have asked for a better place for my birthday dinner.

Astemio is pretty nondescript from the front.  It’s advertised as a wine bar/restaurant and had a menu posted out front that showed half “mare” which is marine food and half “terra” which is non-seafood from land.  So that right there sold me.  Every other restaurant we walked by was “Pick your fish from this pile and we will cook it how you like it” (for those who don’t know, I am not a seafood person which makes eating out from port or port somewhat of a challenge at times) We went in and the interior was sleek and modern, quite a shocker from the drab and concrete outside, but what was even better was that they had a garden in the back.  There was a garden surrounded by a bamboo barrier that made it secluded from the apartments and buildings around it and that again had that sleek modern design that just popped at night.  There was a flat screen TV mounted to one wall with all kinds of music playing (it was an MTV type station that actually played music constantly) and the entire garden had little white stones as the ground.  Our waitress said her English was no good, but she carried on conversations with us and was absolutely helpful and delightful.  It’s a family run restaurant and her brother was the cook.  Her grandfather is American and that is where she picked up what English she knows and has practiced on random boaters that come to the secluded town like us.  I ended up ordering an amazing veal in lemon sauce with onions and potatoes that came with a spinach salad on the side.  It was delicious.  Dad got a buffalo mozzarella (this area is its birthplace) and spicy pepperoni calzone, but after tasting my meal said he should’ve gotten mine instead.  We ordered two crafts of the local Sicilian red and had the best time.  For dessert they had a mouse ice cream kind of thing drizzled in chocolate and a sweet dessert wine served in a shot glass.  Now I was thinking after all of this we would be running up a pretty nice tab, a whole €38 later we left with such a great impression of Sicily and of the restaurant we couldn’t have asked for a better time.

A toast to my birthday.  We ordered dessert and with it came a very sweet dessert wine that as you can see they serve in shot glasses for very small sips are a time.

As we left, there was live music playing in the piazza in front of the Basilica Martice San Pietro, so we decided to check it out.  It ended up being an Italian ska band, Baciamo la Mani, playing a free concert on a Sunday night.  There were people of all ages out at 11pm on a Sunday night dancing and just hanging out enjoying the music.  Small children and dogs ran around playing while parents and older people sat in the chairs or on the steps of the church, like we did, tapping their feet and enjoying the energy coming off the stage.  It was the perfect ending to the night.  Who could ask for anything more?

This was the ska band, Baciamo la Mani playing in front of the Basilica Matrice San Pietro.  It was such a fun concert.

There were people dancing and chairs out for people to sit and enjoy the free outdoor concert in the center of town.  Like I said, people and dogs ranging from the very young to the very old out at 11pm on a Sunday night.  It was great.

We decided to stay in Reposto one more night because of the weather and because we really needed an extra day to chill out and fix things.  My one job on my birthday was to go grocery shopping.  You would think that would be easy enough, right.  There is a chain of grocery stores in Italy called PAM.  These are very much like American supermarkets.  A one stop shop where you can pick up everything from crackers to produce to meat and get some toilet paper or toothpaste alone the way.  I was told there was a PAM close to the marina.  I didn’t end up finding it until I had already been to 2 other supermarkets and walked clear around the city.  I found two smaller grocery stores that function more like convenient stores in the states.  You can get dried goods, drinks, toilet paper, and there is a cheese and sliced meats counter, but no “carne” meat or produce.  I got the basics like soda and beer and eggs, but had to search for a place to stock up on meats and veggies.  A nice lady told me the butcher shops aren’t open on Mondays but would be open Tuesday, the day we leave.  She directed me towards the PAM express which was mini-version of the bigger chain.  Luckily they had a butcher was a small, but big enough variety of chicken, pork, and sausage.  Stuff I could identify and translate.  So I was good on that front, but their vegetables and fruits looked sad and on a boat with constant humidity down below fresh produce doesn’t last long at all.  We stocked up before we left Amalfi and a red pepper had actually imploded and turned into more of a rotten juice by the time we got to Reposto.  So it is of great importance to buy things as fresh as possible otherwise they won’t last and you are looking at bugs and smells from down below.  I ended up at a fresh vegetable market and bought what looked half decent.  A couple of oranges, apples, fresh carrots, and that was about it.  That is what canned vegetables are made for right?

The rest of our time in Reposto was spent napping, filling the water tanks, and putsing.  

I wear my harness at night...

Sailing at night is a lot like sailing during the day… you have to watch out not to run into anything and you just keep moving.  The differences are – it’s dark, we are required to wear a harness/lifejacket and remain in the cockpit unless we are both on deck and can watch the other person fix the sails or whatever is caught, and there is a terrific view of a million stars. 

It is also a lot like driving at night.  For those of you who know our family, you know we drive everywhere.  Wisconsin, Maryland, around Alaska, we have always been a family that will load up the car and just drive to wherever it is we are going.  With that comes driving at night.  We have found through our extensive experience that a good book on tape with a good reader helps fight the urge to sleep and makes the time pass a lot faster.

Well I have a couple books on my iPod thanks to my Aunt Karen, and I thought starting my first 4 hour shift which was 8pm – 12am with “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown would make it a cake walk… it would’ve worked except that the man reading it has a somewhat monotone voice that just lulls you to sleep.  I switched to music and that four hours was easy.  It was the 4am – 8am shift that was more difficult to stay awake on, but with the amount of ship traffic, it was a good thing I did.

Night time is best for big ships to transport things because there are fewer boats on the water to get in the way.  Except for those pesky Americans who are crazy enough to share the water with these guys.  Around 5am I saw 3 different big ships, checked the radar and had to wake Dad up twice because they were too close for comfort.  The first one Dad actually had to get on the radio and make sure they even saw us, they were getting so close.  These ships are going 20 knots and would crush us like a bug if we got in the way.  It wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference to the person driving because it’s not his or her ship and we would only leave a small red paint smudge on the front of the ship.  So we have to watch out for our own tails and make sure we are seen and get out of their way.  This was the only real close call and Dad was able to get a couple of hours of sleep after that. 

We passed Stromboli on the second day, which is basically an island made out of an active volcano.  We got close enough to see the smoke billowing out of the top and Dad had planned on getting there at night so I could see the lava spitting out too, but we were making great time and left Agropoli earlier than anticipated.  It was still a cool sight on what has become our “Italian Volcano Tour 2010”.  Because we were headed towards the Messina straight, which Dad had never passed through before, we didn’t wanted to get there during the night.  So we heaved-to which meant we essentially stopped the boat and arranged everything so we were a floating duck in the water until around 1am when we would time it just right to get to the straight at sunrise.  This watch was about 2.5 hours each, and we were able to make a really good dinner on board while enjoying the sunset.  There was some wind and we ended up spinning around like a top throughout the night.  Not enough to make a person dizzy by any means, but enough to move us about 2-3 miles away from where we started and give us a good view of every surrounding island.  I didn’t see a single boat during my watch. Dad got to see a cruise boat head towards the straight but that was about it.  The trip to the straight was a tough watch for me.  I woke up at around 4:30am and was on til 6am when the sun came up.  It was really hard staying awake but really important because the closer we got, the bigger the ships got. 

This is the view of our approach to Stromboli.  We were supposed to be approaching from night because you can apparently see lava spitting out of the top too… the smoke was pretty awesome to see though.  

This was the other side of the volcano.  You can see where the lava flow goes down, because nothing is growing there.  You can also see, on the right hand side, a town.  There is a small town located on the volcano.

The first night we grazed for dinner, not really thinking about eating an actual meal.  The second night we decided to break out the big guns and Dad made breaded chicken, fresh green beans, and I made mashed potatoes.  It was so good.

The second night we got to sit still and watch the sun set.  The photos of course don’t it justice.

The timing was right on and we went through exhausted, but alert as we saw the main ferry route between mainland Italy and Sicily.  The ferries have the right away in Italian waters and we were just trying to get through without getting in the way.  As one would leave one side, another would leave the other and it reminded me very much of the ferry to the Magic Kingdom, but much faster and not as friendly. 

I crashed after that and woke up close to our assent to Reposto with a great view of Mt. Etna.  Some fun facts about Etna, it is one of the world’s major active volcanoes and is the largest and highest in Europe. The volcano has erupted 11 times in the past 30 years and while lava flows, destroying cable cars that take tourists up, the literature says it almost never threatens human life. 

The second night we got to sit still and watch the sun set.  The photos of course don’t it justice.

The Italian Waters Pilot book stated to watch out for the winds and currents around the base of the volcano.  We started to feel the ever changing gusts of wind and the swells began to mount as we got closer.  What was crazy was right when we were at the point of lowering the main sail, huge swells started to hit us straight on.  Every other boat decided to go into port when we did, and we were feeling swells of I thought 4 or 5 feet (I may be exaggerating a tiny bit, but not by much) that rocked the boat every way possible and threw anything that was loose down below to a completely different area of the boat.  Everything on the deck went flying into the cockpit and thank God Dad had already lowered the halyard (which requires him to climb up about 2 feet on the mast) otherwise he would’ve been in the water with those waves and I would’ve had to figure out how to get him out!  He’s shown me all of the rescue equipment and we have gone over what to do in a man overboard situation, but if I could barely stand up and avoid falling overboard myself, it would make those procedures a lot more difficult.  

Where the good stuff is...

The Museo Nazionale, or National Museum, is located right outside the walls of the ancient city of Paestum.  Well we actually think it’s located on part of the buried city, but that’s just a technicality. 

Scenes like this one were lined across the top of the museum on display.  They were from the sanctuary to Hera.

This was a statue of Hera.  It was pretty small which made me wonder if it was on a smaller shrine or if there were more than one?

These are a pair of vases that were found in the city.  The pictures and detail are impressive.  It is also impressive that they are in such great shape over 2000 years after they were made.  They just don’t make things like they used it.

This fresco is one of the symbols of Paestum.  A lot of the content of the museum was tomb paintings they discovered when they excavated a local cemetery.  They found jewelry, pottery, and other things people got buried with in order to take with them.  The most fascinating discovery though were the paintings on the walls of the tombs.

This is a different tomb, but it gives you an idea of what the different depictions were inside the tombs.  These are some rare examples of Greek and pre-Roman pictorial art.

These lions lined the top of the Temple of Hera.  I am not sure if they were used as a sacrifice, protector, or decorative role. 

Modern art?  Along the road of tourist shops and cafes where more ruins are known to be buried, there is a stone shop that makes lawn ornaments among other things and there was Snow White staring out at me.  There are illegal Disney reproductions everywhere, but the princesses always remind me of my BFF Glo.

Christianity + Malaria = Desertion

Dad made it a point of taking me to what he thought and to what I have to agree is one of the best Greek/Roman ruins in Italy, Paestum.

What was originally a Greek city named Poseidonia founded around 6^th century BC, was later taken over by the Romans in 273 BC and Latinized to Paestum.  The Romans apparently changed the layout of the city and built a couple of temples and things to make it their own.  The city was deserted as Christianity and malaria spread up the coast.  (I am not saying the spread of Christianity is as deadly as malaria, but in Polytheistic city it’s one in the same)

The one thing that was disappointed was the English map of the ruins.  We received an Italian one and kept it but the ticket lady said there was one in English at the tourist center so we thought it might put things into perspective by getting that one too.  Over half of the things aren’t labeled on the English one, which we didn’t discover until we looked at the Italian one and the historical description of the city was terrible.  It was 2 pages of run on information that wasn’t really translated into complete sentences.  Oh well we figured it out and had fun using what knowledge we have gained along the way to figure out what was what.

Like the other ruins, this is going to be best described in photos:

On our quest for the English map, we stumbled across this church, Basilica Paleocristiana V sec.  It was pretty plain on the exterior and as you can see somewhat stark on the interior, yet it was striking.  There was a terracotta floor with designs going towards the altar and the raw materials gave the church a real quality.  There was a plaque outside that stated the church had started off as a basic place of worship like it is in now, in an effort to attract people and raise money someone blinged it out, but then it was stripped back to its original state.

Dad and I in front of the Tempio di Athena.  This is the first temple when you walk into the ruins and it’s quite impressive.  There are three temples like this built and still intact.  I still can’t wrap my head around how many slaves and how long it would take to build a temple of this magnitude.

One of the things we discovered on our own, without the help of our crappy English map, was the baths.  Every town had them so it was just a process of elimination and looking for clues to discover where they were.  Tada!  We could tell because of the bigger mosaic work on what is left of the walls and because of drainage holes along the bottom of the walls.  There was also space between what looked like one building and the next which would serve as some sort of sewage drain.  The Romans used some of the same structures the Greeks already had and just built around or on them.  The clay bricks are Roman and the bigger boulders are Greek.

When the Romans invaded this small temple called the Heroon was already erected.  Out of respect to the God that was honored there, they didn’t break it down, they just buried it and built a wall around it.  Problem solved.

Welcome to the ancient city of Paestum. 

Just like at Pompeii you can see where the chariots used to use the road.  There were some pretty extreme grooves in the stones here.  They didn’t have the sidewalks or pedestrian stones though so whatever was drained into the street was walked in I am sure.

This was a marble “pool” that would’ve been in the middle of a house.  We figured that this was a pretty big house based on the number of rooms, size of the pool, and the face that it was made of marble, not bricks.  The ceiling would be open above the pool area to collect rain water to drink and store in a cistern that wasn’t still standing in this location.  The well type holes were still there though.

This is Dad the Gladiator.  Half of the theater was visible to the public, while the other half was buried under a road that was built to let people access the ruins and to serve as a great place for vendors to set up tourist trap shops. 

We got to the ruins right when they opened, which also happened to be right when the sun was coming up facing them.  This was the view of Tempio de Nettuno, or Temple of Poseidon, the crown jewel of Paestum.

This is a close up of the columns.  I am still amazed at how they were constructed and the slave labor and raw materials that would’ve been used.

Dad, Mow, and I posing in front of the Temple de Nettuno.  This gives a great perspective of its sheer size.  There were 36 fluted columns rivaling some of the finest temples in Greece.

One final shot of the Temple de Nettuno.  It was absolutely awe inspiring and beautiful.  In this shot you can see the levels of the interior.  There were three “rooms” of columns inside that housed various statues and offerings to the god.

Located next to the Temple de Nettuno was what the maps named the Basilica, but the plaque corrects this misunderstanding and states it as the Temple to Hear, Zeus’s wife.  It isn’t as big as the Temple de Nettuno, but it holds it own.

The Temple to Hear had one interior “room” made of columns.  All of the temples, while magnificent in size, were fairly basic in design, what made them spectacular during the 6^th century was all of the statues and exterior decorations that are now located in the Museo Nazionale located just outside the ruin walls.

Kansas is lost in the distance...

Agropoli was the first place Dad and I sailed to just the two of us.

We left Amalfi at around 8am when the fuel dock opened and I steered us out of the marina spot for the first time ever, without running into anything I am happy to report.  €250 later we had full fuel tanks and set the auto pilot to Agropoli.

We got the sails up and took advantage what wind there was.  Granted we went about 20 degrees off course, but we were going 5 knots while doing it and it was a lot of fun to be able to get the sails up and actually sail without the motor.  We left early enough that we going have some fun and go off course for a little while.

I was really nervous about docking just the two of us.  It works best with 4 people because Dad was working the helm (steering), we had John working the bow line, I took one stern line, Jenny took the other one, and we could all take a moment and fend off if we got too close to the boat next to us.  Well take two of those people away and there are more jobs than people.  Dad and I had a crew meeting on our way in and decided I would grab the bow line with the hook and pass it his way while he was easing the boat into the slip, then I would throw the person on the dock our stern lines and we would just hope we weren’t going to run into anything.  The guy at the marina showed us the spot which was a night tight fit and we got lucky.  There was only one instance where we were coming too close to the German boat next to ours, but their fenders bounced us off and we were able to correct and then just wedge our way into the spot.  Nice and slow so we could tie off and not worry about going anywhere.  Pretty darn close to perfect docking.

These signs are posted all along the “road” next to the docks.  You can see the scooter passing on one side and then the boat passing the other side.  It made me giggle.

This is where our boat is docked.  It gives you an idea of how when you squeeze into a spot, how our boat just sort of parts the other boats and wedges in.  I have learned how important fenders (the rubber bumpy things hanging off of the side of the boat) are to the safety of the crew and to avoid damage to the boat, or any boats around us.  The town of Agropoli is in the background.

We put the gang plank down, opened all of the hatches, and put everything away, which also took a little bit longer with only two people, but we managed and then decided to go to shore in search of a bus for the following day trip to Paestum and a possible internet connection.

We realized that we were as far from Kansas as humanly possible.  The further south we got in Italy the more remote places we were visiting, and the more we had to rely on our broken Italian.  Pretty much nobody spoke English so we had to say “Dove, autobus Paestum?” which is “Where, bus Paestum?”.  Luckily some people understood what we were trying to achieve with that terribly broken sentence and we managed to find the bus stop after walking in a nice circle around town.  What made it worse was we were doing this at around 3:00pm which is siesta time for everyone.  The streets were pretty much deserted with the exception of old men and café owners.  It was great to take it all in though and struggle through the communications.

Another cultural difference we noted later that night was that the younger crowd drove out and hung out on the docks at night.  Now younger is defined as 30s and below.  The older people hang out in town as do the families.  It was interesting seeing cars rolling up on the dock and people getting out with the sole purpose of talking and socializing.  In America this would be more of a drug deal situation and they wouldn’t hang out there.  Something else I noticed in Italy is that after dinner everyone goes outside and takes a walk.  They stroll and socialize and enjoy the cool evening together.  Cafes with internet only generally have tourists sitting there with their computers unlike a place like Panera where there is also a person hooked up to a phone or computer even if they are sitting with a group of people.  The lines of communication are very open here and people talk, with their hands, at the same time, and about things I can’t even identify, but they just sit together and talk.

These are the empty streets of Agropoli at around 3:00pm.  When we went back at around 9:00pm the place was packed with people.  It was a really pretty city and very pedestrian friendly.

This is a pizzeria we went to that Dad had been to before.  A lot of the buildings here were surprisingly modern inside.  This was a great example.  We went for dinner the night we arrived and then went for lunch the next day before we set sail.  The pizza was really good and almost rivaled Renna’s from home and it was just a fun place to eat.  We also got to watch some sort of Italian game show which is always fun.