Palermo
Today is my (Thilos) last day on Sicily!! Nooo!
We get up early to rush to the train station, heading to Palermo City. As usual we had to run again. This time we even had to do a bit parkour and dodge a bunch of puddles:
We would like to explore a National Park (which we eventually did not). In Palermo, we once again dropped our baggage at the overprized baggage shop so that we could move more flexible during the day. Yael led us to some Scooter Rental shops, most of which had no further scooters left to rent. In one final trial we rented electro-scooters (kickboards) to reach a scooter shop that was quite far away. We crossed paved streets, crowded pedestrial areas…. I’m surprised we didn’t crash tbh :p
We reached the final scooter shop who in fact had several scooters still available! The shop was exposed to the raw sun, we nearly died while one of their workers introduced us to the principles of scooter driving. (I tried to hide behind a street lamp for some shae-D lol).
15 seconds after driving off the Scooter Rental, we ended up in a pedestrial zone right away :D I hope the renters were not watching #nofucks
With our newly established scooter career we followed the coast of Palermo. The shore is accompanied by huge, impressive cliffs that none of us expected to see. We ended up at a place called “Capo Gallo”, where we took a bath. The water there is crystal blue clear with a rocky shore and sandy floors within the water. We used Yaels GoPro to capture some further diving moments and used a Boye to establish positive bouyancy. #PADI-certified bitcheess
Back at the shore we ate some apero which consisted of hard bread and cornflakes (#spoiled). Timo was already hungry again and as usually proposed to go to a restaurant, which we ended up doing around 3pm. My ferry was going to depart at 1830; i had to check in 2 hours before departure though, which meant that the rest of our scooter journey consisted of collecting our baggage + buying supplies. We ended up circling around the whole city as most streets are only one way streets or pedestrial Zones! I nearly missed the ferry because of that stuff!
After shopping, Yael and I lost team Hildabert which meant that I left the homies without even saying goodbye :(
(We had no time to regroup as I was already late for the ferry #upsies)
On the ferry, my heart started aching as I watched the black smog arising from the ferry’s chimneys in front of the harbour of Palermo… enjoy your last travel days babesss and see you soon!
End of Thilo.
Getting Lost in Palermo
Team Hildabert had no idea what was going on as they had lost team TY before they even got to the port for Thilo’s departure. Luckily, Yael managed to transmit her location and an SOS-cry with her last few drops of electron juice in her phone. Yael waited at the port entrance until Hildabert came to her rescue.
By violating traffic laws only another couple of times they managed to find each other again. Having about one hour and a half left before having to return the scooters we thought we would have enough time getting to a second beach to go for a swim. How wrong we were… After a long time trying to maneuvre through the ever increasing evening traffic without covering much distance and almost bumping every second vehicle in our way we decided to go more or less directly back to the rental store. We stopped at a cute little park to walk around and eat some ice cream until we suddenly realised that we had almost no time left (AGAIN!) because we had promised to bring the scooters back refueled. Consulting Google maps we realised that holding this promise was impossible in our current position so we headed straight back to the store. However, this too turned out to be a nearly impossible task considering the 3 BILLION ONE-WAY STREETS in Palermo, OH MY GOSH. We eventually managed to reach the store by driving through several pedestrian zones and one-way streets in the wrong direction, woopsie. Just when we arrived at the store Yael, the very inexperienced scooter driver, tried to roll the scooter onto the side walk. What she forgot was that turning her hand leads to acceleration and she let her scooter wheel kiss the wall o_O Luckily the guy from the scooter rental chose this exact moment to look away, phew.
Finally free we took up some e-scooters again and since we only found one with enough electron juice Timo played Taxi and precrariously we approached the train station by driving in tandem.
The train ride was very interesting as we were the only ones on the tiny connecting train to our next Airbnb in Terrasini which turned out to be exactly as on the pictures which is very rare, noice.
Images of the day
Buildings in Palermo
Very fancy tree we found in a park
