We left the apt bright and early and made it to Madrid around 3:00. It was drizzling, windy and temps in the 50's...but right after we arrived, the sun came out and the rain stopped. Supposed to be nice tomorrow. The apartment is very spacious but that could just be that we were used to the small Palermo place. LOL The terrace is amazing, though, and I look forward to spending a lot of time out there. We found out that tomorrow and Tuesday are national holidays--...

We woke up to 50's and overcast skies today, which felt great after a few days of upper 70's. I know y'all back in Houston think, "waa waa", but crammed on a bus and walking everywhere makes one toasty. :)) We hit the Capo Market early (Sicilian early, which was 9:00) and ran into our tour guide from the food tour! He spotted us first, very friendly guy. We managed to buy a bunch of fruit & veggies, bread and olives...not many speak English but pointing works...

We decided to try our luck with catching the local city bus to take us to the beach area, called Mondello. Our apartment host, Massimo, gave us directions on how to get there and which buses to take. We managed to find the first one, but waited almost an hour to find/catch the next one. Ugh. We finally got on it, and then jumped the gun and got off too soon!!! #CityBusFail. I suppose in the long run it worked out okay, because as we were walking to Mondello, we s...

We began our day by walking over to one of the most famous churches in Palermo. You can really see the Arab influence in the architecture, it's quite impressive. I tried to limit how many different areas I took pictures of because you could literally take hundreds and not capture everything there is to see!! We bought a ticket to see all the different areas, which included a climb to the top, the crypts, and the tombs. The stairs to the top were much deeper than ...

I realized this morning that I haven't taken any pictures of our apartment here in Palermo. So I tidied up a bit and snapped away. It looks just like it did in the online photos--small but has everything we need and for a fraction of the price of a hotel. It's on the first floor, which in Europe is a flight of stairs up, they call the bottom floor the ground floor. It was kind of scary that first night we arrived, because we felt like we were going down a little ...