Benvenuto!
Welcome to Our Rick Steves Best of Sicily Tour and an Independent Week in Rome!!
Ciao! We are Jodi (the maker of this scrapbook), Brett, and Deb (Brett's mom). We have been on two other Rick Steves tours together and decided to go on another, this time to Sicily! To finish out the week after our tour ended, but before we needed to be home, we decided to go to Rome. Why? It is easy to get from the end of the tour in Catania to Rome, and there are direct flights between Rome and Chicago O'Hare, but also because it has been quite some time since any of us have been there. I felt I could find experiences we hadn't had before, so we decided it was a good place to end our time in Europe! |
WHY DO WE TRAVEL? WHY SICILY?
Island of Sicily
We travel because we love to experience new things, see new places, taste new foods, and experience cultures different from our own. Sicily fit that bill. In addition to native islanders the Ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Normans, and the Spanish all passed through and left a mark. They helped make Sicily what it is today, and we wanted to experience that.
We travel because we love to experience new things, see new places, taste new foods, and experience cultures different from our own. Sicily fit that bill. In addition to native islanders the Ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Normans, and the Spanish all passed through and left a mark. They helped make Sicily what it is today, and we wanted to experience that.
WHY RICK STEVES?
For Brett and I this was our 4th RS tour, and our 3rd with Deb. We like to travel independently as well, so why do we go back for more tours? There are a lot of reasons, but:
Fabulous Guides! We have loved all of our guides on all of our tours. They were all great at managing the group, making sure things went smoothly, and helping tour members with any questions they had for their free time. Fabulous Experiences! We had great experiences on all of our tours. This trip we were able to have so many different amazing experiences. We marveled at golden mosaics, made cannoli's with a very special lady, saw Ancient Greek temples, viewed Roman mosaics, and walked around on Mama Etna! It's Made Easy! They take care of the transportation and hotels, and that is worth a lot! It makes it so much more relaxing. |
The temple at Segesta was spectacular, and it was in an amazing setting. You could see a long ways off into the distance from the theatre, and got the best view of the temple on our way down the hill from the theatre to the temple.
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Navigating this ScrapbookI have done this scrapbook chronologically, with a welcome page (this one, benvenuto) to start out and a final good-bye page ( arrivederci!) to wrap things up. At the bottom of each page is a button that hints at what awaits you for the next day and clicking on it will take you to the next page. If you'd like to jump out of sequence, just use the drop-down words from the RS Sicily and Rome tabs.
In addition to all of the amazing parts of our tour this scrapbook also has: * Links to websites which are in blue. Clicking on those words will take you to a separate website. * Practicalities - laundry, packing, electronics etc... * Pro-tips: Highlighted in green will hopefully help you out if you are ever in these locations. |
Practicalities ~ Packing!
Rick says it over and over and over, and he's right. Pack light! The picture above is what I took for our not quite 3 week trip to Italy. It kept me foot loose and fancy free, and wasn't a burden to carry up and down the many staircases in our hotels. It also fit in the overhead bin just fine on all of our flights. I also had my DSLR camera that I took the photo of my luggage with. In addition, I like to use packing cubes to keep things from sliding all over my luggage.