Our daughter's friend Rainer

is a musician, not a mechanic.

No problem: His aging Citroin

languishes in its assigned parking spot in Gelsenkirchen most of the year.

We weren't too surprised, however, to learn that it faltered slightly

last summer on its first long outing in months, a vacation trip to Italy.

They drove the length of the

peninsula and took a ferry to Sicily. Mary and Rainer found the island

a mixed bag. Her letter continues:

"To be brief, Sicily seems

to be the best and worst of Italy. Some of the churches are magnificent,

with mosaics like you can't imagine, a pretty coastline, well-preserved

Greek and Roman ruins, nice food, lemon trees and flowers. One of the

few things worth seeing in central Sicily is a Roman villa with beautiful

mosaic floors (150 AD), well preserved because they didn't find it until

1950, and almost completely covered with glass ceilings and walls.

"But also in Sicily: trash,

bombed-out cities (Palermo, from WWII), noise (one street in Palermo has

been measured to be Italy's loudest), traffic, pollution, although only

in certain areas where they have factories and refineries that were built

to help out the poor south. Did visit a canyon, like in Zion [National

Park in Utah], where you wade in the water until you give up, depending

on how wet you're willing to get, and hiked down to a river with a series

of pools, also like in Zion.

"We also drove up Mt.

Etna, through lava fields, some recent one village was believed spared

only because inhabitants held up some Madonna statue. Then, since the

cable car wasn't running, we got ourselves schlepped up in an all-terrain

vehicle, for lots of money. We didn't get terribly close to any active

crater we could see it smoking in the distance but it was neat, windy

and cool, lava dust in some places covered with snow, very moon-like.

"Otherwise, Greek and

Roman temples in Taormina, Siracusa and Agrigento, where I must admit,

it got a little boring another walled city. Palermo was Sicily in the

extreme, another beautiful setting, like Naples, a great bay with mountains

behind it. We went in by bus, thoroughly chaotic driving, even on the

autostrada, through markets that varied from cute to threatening, and

the most harmonious, mosaic-covered cathedral I have ever seen, in Monreale.

"To spare Rainer some

of the drive back, and also because the car was acting unreliable (we

got a fan belt replaced cheap! but the guy couldn't find anything else

wrong), we took the ferry from Palermo to Genoa, 21 hours, with a little

inside cabin. You'd think it was a cruise, for all they offered: swimming

pool, whirlpool, fitness center, beauty shop, live music. I think we spent

most of the time dozing.

"I was surprised how many

islands there are. I know Corsica and Elba; if I think hard, there are

Giglio and Montecristo, but that doesn't account for all that we saw,

including some completely uninhabited.

"Going back past Milan,

we stopped at a very fancy Carthusian monastery where they make Chartreuse

liquor, and tried to see da Vinci's Last Supper, but one needs a reservation.

Got through the Gotthard tunnel with about a half hour wait since it still

wasn't quite high season, and then luckily not before Rainer's car decided

it needed a break. We barely made it off the Autobahn, saw a Citroin dealer

and a campground (it was Sunday) and decided to stop.

"Lovely, at the very tip

of Lake Lucerne in the middle of Switzerland, mountains and streams, quaint

and clean villages, where the only road goes by the jammed campground.

After it rained and we had to pack a wet tent, I knew why I like to go

south.

"The car was OK the next

day, and we made it to within about an hour of Koln, when we apparently

lost the clamp that holds the hose to the coolant tank. In any case, somebody

improvised the hose clamp and we drove to another Citroin dealer and waited

a couple of hours and spent 261DM to have them fix it properly."

While in Palermo, by the way,

Mary bought her dad a Christmas present: a red baseball cap with a tiny

plastic fan in the bill, powered by a little solar panel on top. When

we couldn't make it run by shining a flashlight on it, I wrote and told

Mary it was an excuse to go