Our Stop in Messina

We got on the ship in Rome (or close enough to Rome). We did our muster drill to make sure we all understood how to survive a close encounter with an iceberg or Kate Winslet. We ate food and then finally we went to sleep. Well some of us did. Actually Bonnie and I sat through this 1 hour presentation on Messina and all of the things you can do there. Bonnie and Kelly were all set to tour a jewelry shop and go see Mt. Etna. Ed and I had absolutely nothing to do. Then I saw this presentation.

The presentations are funny, informative, and more than anything else, a way for the ship to make a lot more money. You show up and the session is part information and part stand up comedy. John was our cruise director and he made everything sound like it would be the most amazing experience in your life. He would start every section off with "If you're going to do anything in this port you have to do this...". The problem was that he would say that for every tour in the port. So it made it seem like you should be taking seven tours a day.

Anyway, he sold me. I left the information session thinking to myself, "you know, I never have been to a volcano and that is a shame". I suddenly couldn't believe that I had not signed up to walk up a live volcano. How stupid could I have been. This should have happened years ago. Anyone who is anyone has been to a volcano at least once in their life. I must do this! Of course it never occured to me that I would have two opportunities to see a volcano on our cruise. I could see the famous Vesuvius (kind of like a rock star in the geological world) OR I can see Mt. Etna, which besides having some sort of health care named after it has never done anything important. I chose Etna.

I found Ed at dinner and we talked. Somehow our inner man came out...we were going to climb a damned volcano! Uh, we never could imagine just how anticlimactic this would be. Walking up a volcano is no different than walking up a damned mountain! No one tells you this. They trick you with all the volcanoey stuff and none of the real world steep hilly stuff! It is also just about as entertaining as walking up a mountain, except there are no trees, no grass, nothing, because it is a volcano.

So in short, we took a harrowing bus ride up the mountin (and as a side note, if the world ever goes down the tubes, I want our bus driver as our rescue driver...man can thread a six ton bus through a 8 foot wide alleyway at 40 miles an hour....dude rocks), we then got out of the bus and had an hour to explore two craters and a gift shop.

All in all it was our first trip so we had nothing to gauge it against, but in hindsite...well it was a volcano. Thats all I can say. That and I can say "Sorry Ed" for dragging you up a damned volcano when you probably would rather have been sleeping.