Loving Palermo for a few days. And Navily too.

We are really enjoying our time here in Palermo and expect to depart on Monday for points east and by the end of the month, Licata where Pandora will spend the winter. Our plans for next season are up in the air but perhaps we will head north to Croatia. Brenda will be heading to Scotland the last week of May so that suggests that I will get crew to run Pandora from where ever Brenda flies out of, likely eastern Italy, to move Pandora north to well, somewhere.

For now, i am focused in where to go and when to ensure that we get to Licata where Pandora will spend the winter and with abouit 250 miles to go and a need to be in Licata for about a week to get Pandora ready, we do have to keep moving.

However…

Palermo is a very nice place and the marina the best one we have ever spent time in. At about $100 a night, including both water and electric, it won’t break the bank, well not as long as we don’t stay too long…

It is pretty nice…

The city even has a huge reflecting pond with fountains. Nice.

Pandora on a very nice dock.

Yes, nice docks.

The view of the mountains and nearby industrial port is impressive.

It is a very busy harbor with a constant parade of cruise ships coming and going. This photo doesn’t really show the scale of these ships in a fairly small harbor. However, they do blot out much of that view when they come around the corner.

As the city is fairly large, the addition of thousands of passengers doesn’t really change much, especially since they are back aboard for dinner.

Yesterday we went to a large outdoor market and while I was fascinated by the noise and hustle, Brenda and Leslie decided, within a few minutes, that they wanted to decamp for a yarn store that was a bit less “real”.

It was mobbed although this photo doesn’t make the point. I had to wait for the crowd to clear a bit in order to even take a photo.

I stuck around for a while and had lunch. Sadly, the octopus salad that I had turned out to be raw and it had a pretty good “tooth”. I got a good amount of exercise by the time I was done. Not to worry as I was able to wash it down with a 3 euro local beer.

There was pretty much every sort of food you could imagine for sale and speaking of octopus, I have no idea if these were cooked of what made them so red.

Spices of every kind.

The spices were the one area that Brenda was interested in before she fled.

Not so much interest from Brenda in the slippery seafood. In spite of that, I did get some swordfish and cooked it aboard last night. Don’t ask, don’t tell. It was a hit.

Lots of cooked food for sale and plenty of tables to sit at. The place was hopping around lunchtime with hardly an empty seat.

Just about everything imaginable was for sale.

Lots of precooked options that looked pretty good to me. Not sure that the ever-present flies would be appealing to Brenda. Better for her not to see that…

Some of the vegetables were new to me.

Street fry, aptly named.

Liquor licenses are a lot simpler here, if there are licenses at all, than in the US. And lower prices to match.

And, of course, flowers and I do love flowers.

Before Leslie arrived, we had to do our laundry done and like so much else that feels like “first time” on this trip, the place we did the laundry was indeed “different”. It was basically a number of machines mounted directly into a wall on a street corner. No place to fold, right out there in the open with cars whizzing by. And, they really wiz, let me tell you. There are cross walks where cars have to stop but all they really do is to weave around you as you make your way across. It feels pretty risky at best.

Turn around from the machines and it was quite a view. So, while the machines were running, we decamped for a cafe on that square. Convenient for sure.

There is lots of beautiful architecture in the city worth exploring and today we plan to visit a museum before Leslie departs. I have no idea what this museum is all about but I pick this one…

This beautiful building was directly across the square from one of the knitting stores that Brenda and Leslie visited. I sat down in a cafe nearby while they swooned over balls of yarn.

We aren’t exactly sure when we will depart here but at nearly 100 euros a day in the marina, it does add up. Sadly, there aren’t many protected anchorages along the north coast of Sicily, or most anywhere we have been for that matter, so picking a good time to go is important so we don’t end up in an unpleasant or dangerous anchorage.

Looking at the weather for the next few days suggests that there will not be much, if any wind but that doesn’t mean that we will be able to avoid a north swell, which comes and goes as there aren’t a lot of sheltered places to anchor.

One service that has proven to be invaluable in understanding what to expect when we anchor and to help in choosing a marina is www.Navily.com. It is basically a free site that you can check the conditions on pretty much every possible place you might anchor and see what the weather “score” is, hour by hour, for wind and swell. And, for a modest membership, you can get the score farther out into the future, the next 72 hours. Additionally, as we spend time in any given place, the app prompts me to leave a review along with photos. It also provides a summary of reviews and specific comments from users so it’s a really useful resource.

Given how exposed many/most of the anchorages are and how variable the winds are, this service is invaluable and we generally don’t move without consulting the app.

So, our next decision is when and where we will go. As of now we are scheuled to depart tomorrow so it is time to decide.

I guess I’ll have to consult my friend Navily, not to forget Chat GPT too. Wouldn’t want him, her, they to feel left out.

Which begs the question. Do they feel? Scarry thought…