Getting Lost in Sicily

Being able to explore Sicily is one of the great advantages of living here. I must admit, though, I find the driving over here just a bit scary. Most of the rules here seem to be more suggestions rather than hard and fast rules. I have seen my husband try some crazy stunts on the road since we've been here. The scary part is that no one bats an eyelash. The other day we were driving down the road and I saw him pass two cars at one time. Once we got back into our appropriate lane, I realized that another car was heading straight at us in our lane. The funny part is that I didn't even blink. It's then I realized I've been here for too long. Point being is that to get along around here you have to just get used to the way traffic goes. And to get around you have to be willing to get lost a little.

Ben and I finally developed a theory on getting lost here. It was sometime after our trip to Erice which is on the west coast of Sicily. We drove there with some friends and it took about three hours by car. After that we figured the most we could get lost in any direction was three hours. At that point we'd hit the coast and we could just turn around and come back. Took a lot of the fear out of getting lost. What I didn't count on was the date factor ...

Now, one of the interesting things about getting lost around here is that there are no clear indicators of north, east, south or west. You're also not sure where you are in relative distance to any one given landmark. In other words, if you see a sign post pointing towards a specific town, you don't know if you're 64 km or 3 km away from said town. If you're 64 km then you probably want to head towards that town if you're 3 you may not want to be heading there any more. Since you also have no idea which direction you're heading, it could be relatively confusing unless you're intimately familiar with every bit of flora and fauna on the Sicilian country side.

That being said, you can imagine my consternation when I was coming home with my sister one afternoon and missed the exit we wanted to take. I was so busy paying attention to the traffic (see earlier paragraph about Sicilian driving) that I had not realized it until I was a town or two beyond. The problem with this is that once I hit this town, unbeknownst to me beforehand, the tangenziale came to a sudden and abrupt end. This caused a bit of an issue as there was no discernible spot to turn around. I was quite proud of myself and my copilot as neither of us panicked.

Unfortunately, I was supposed to be home for a date with my husband (my very generous sister was offering to babysit) and we were already running late. Fortunately we saw some of those signs saying this town this way. I know we always head towards that town coming home from the airport, so it seemed like a safe bet. Until we were driving out in the middle of the country with nothing looking like civilization in sight. Still, we were heading that way, might as well keep going. After following the markers for this town for a good 15 to 20 minutes we finally hit another pair of sign posts at a traffic circle. It seemed like we had headed in this direction long enough and it was time to change our heading, so we did. Imagine our surprise when we headed in that direction and it turned out we were 2 kilometers from home.

My lessons for the day were this ...
1) The don't panic theory is always correct
2) We were right, you can't get too lost in Sicily
3) Keep number two in mind as long as you have no where specific to be. If you do have to be somewhere, make sure you don't miss your exit.

Now the sad part to the ending of this story is that we raced around like mad, zipped over to the movie theatre, made it there just in the nick of time ... only to find out that they had never received the movie we wanted to see. Isn't that just my luck? Our hot date became dinner and grocery shopping. Ahh, yes ... what I have learned from my sister.