We are up at 6 a.m. for a quick breakfast and shuttle back to the airport, where we have time to find Dubai chocolate for Ed (made from camel’s milk no less) and then convert our remaining dirhams to euros.  It’s a 6-1/2 hour flight to Rome, and we score an exit row again (unlike in the U.S., we find most other countries hold their exit row seats till check in and assign them to really tall passengers).  We have a three-hour layover in Rome where the temperature is a comfortable 46 degrees F when we land.  It is lunch time and we are hungry, so we decide to have our first genuine Italian cuisine, gelato.  Pretty good and healthy, to the extent chocolate is still considered healthy.

We are eventually on our way to Sicily, arriving just over an hour later.  Since we are waiting a week to pick up our rental car (it is our experience that in new locations with really crazy driving going on, it is best to observe for a while from the relative safety of sidewalks), we catch a shuttle train from the airport to the Palermo Centrale train station, just in time to catch the next train to our home for the next month, Cefalu.  It’s dark when we arrive just after 8 p.m., but we are met at the station by Mr. Calio, the local agent for our apartment.  It’s warmer than Rome (54 F. here) but a bit rainy, so we are very thankful not to have to drag our luggage across town in the dark over what turns out to be cobblestone streets in the old city.  We settled in the apartment by 9:00, and go through an alley to grab a beer and a sandwich and get on the internet briefly at Todo Modo, the internet café/bar run by Marco, the nephew of our apartment’s owners.  It’s been a long day, so exploring Cefalu will have to wait for tomorrow. 

Fun facts: temperature in Dar when we left, 93 F; temperature in Rome when we arrived, 46 F.