My Vacation as a Billy Goat and Hiking Fashions

 We are having a wonderful time in Sicily.  The people on our Backroads trip and our two guides couldn’t be better. We have seen all types of beauty this land has to offer, from the sea, to forests and even “Mama Etna,” the beloved nickname of the island’s main volcano! But the mountains, are killing me.  I don’t know if it’s because I’m two years older than our last hiking trip or we didn’t pay attention to the difficulty of the daily climbs, but I’ve spent a lot of the last four days sucking wind. 


It could be the language difference. When our guide says “gentle incline,” I’m thinking it’s like walking up a small ramp into a store. To date, this has not been the case. I have now learned that “gentle incline,” at least in Sicily, means that I will be walking up a steep hill with my head down for an extended period of time…and most of that time, breathing in a way that sounds like it could be part of an obscene phone call. 


Plus, there are a lot of rocks.  I am no Joan of Arc and have decided to use two walking sticks instead of using one as I have done in the past,  because of the ever-present rocks on both our ascending and descending trails. Plus, I can’t get injured as I will need a functioning knee when  I get home.  As Backroads offers all levels of hiking each day, for the last two days, I have opted for the “road more traveled” and taken some of the easier hikes. 


As I said, every single person on this trip is wonderful. But I have a soft spot for two of my fellow travelers, because I can’t quite figure out how they got here. In all three of our hiking trips with Backroads, except for a few adult children who came with their parents, this is a middle age crowd, all of whom are trying to enjoy some (or a lot of) physical activity while seeing the sites.  We are included in this description.  On this trip however, there are two 30 year-old women who have often appeared to have not realized that they are on a hiking trip! 


First, it’s the difference in our clothes.  Most of us, being in our 50s and 60s, look like we are straight out of an L.L. Bean or Eddie Bauer catalogue—and not really in a good way. When I look at us all, the word “frumpy” comes to mind.  Not our girls.  They scoffed at the need for hiking boots, and instead have been wearing chic sneakers (I think that’s what they are).  When it began to rain on one of the hikes, we all removed from our backpacks  (mine, Eddie Bauer, Bob’s, L.L. Bean) our practical rain slickers, but they opened up cute little umbrellas they got from the previous hotel.  When our hikes were broken up into parts of the day, they always returned to the hotel as soon as possible, so that they could take advantage of the spa. 


Yesterday, we were all on our own for dinner and I asked them if they would like to join us that night. One of the women said that they had already made dinner reservations, but could we meet later for drinks?  I told her that after 60, our days of after-dinner drinks were over, as we needed to get in our pajamas and go to sleep ASAP.  We just ran into them at about 2 pm, on the Main Street in beautiful Taormina, and as they told us they were rushing back to the hotel to get a spa treatment, they recommended a restaurant nearby that was a great place for us to have a cocktail.  At the time, I was wearing a canary yellow poncho that I bought from Amazon for $10 and Bob was sporting a Giants poncho on inside out.  We were with another couple who looked equally as “glamorous.” We all looked at each other and started to laugh because the thought of us walking into a restaurant for a mid-afternoon drink, looking like we did, was indeed laughable. I’m really going to miss those two.


The hiking part of our journey ends tomorrow and we are off to Catania. 



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