4/24 We decided to leave Siracusa a day early and travel through Modica, check it out and then press on to Ragusa and spend the night. The drive to Modica was nice. Flowers in bloom, bright red poppies at this one intersection, and miles and miles of stone walls which reminded us of New England. We know all the rocks in these walls, like in NE, were pulled from the fields so the land could be cultivated. We also know that stones and rocks will continue to “grow” and repopulate the fields over the years!

We arrived in Modica to find the streets EXTREMELY NARROW, SKINNY, THIN – if you get the picture! While making a turn, the right front tire fell into a hole and the bumper unhooked itself and was left hanging! This sweet little older Italian woman watched the whole thing and was yelling, trying to help us – the poor woman. We scared her half to death. Trying to get the darn car out of the hole – Jim was backing it up with no luck so I said ok I’ll push and you back it up. This poor woman was totally freaked out by now and worried I’d get squashed. I told Jim okay, back it up now while I push – hey Fran, if it rolls forward, jump out of the way! No problem Jim, hit it, and I pushed and voila, car out of hole! I don’t work out for nothing, LOL! I am sure some of you think I am crazy and you are probably right but hey – it worked!

Now what do we do – we looked at the car, tried to push the bumper back into place – didn’t happen – no duct tape darn it! Fortunately for us, there was a group of men touring together who were talking to the woman who owned the B&B so I told Jim to go up there and see if they could help us. With their help, we got up with the tow truck, a taxi and the rental car company and within one hour we were well on our way to Ragusa by taxi! Figure it out when we get there right? Bottom line though is that we did not want to be driving that car around the next three months! Our memories of Modica I’m afraid were – OMG these narrow, skinny, thin roads – nope, not loving them but the city was pretty nonetheless. We just didn’t get to appreciate much of it.

Got to Ragusa, nothing was open since it was Sunday afternoon. We walked around to find extreme hills up and down but hey after yesterday, we decided to walk. We walked to the end of our street and looked out at the view. The main part of the city was WAY FAR DOWN THE ROAD and I do mean FAR DOWN.

This high tourist interest and old part of the city is named Ragusa Ibla. It can be traced back to 2000 B.C. with a lot of Greek influence then. Talk about memories of high school World History: Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans — who hasn’t been in charge here? Like Noto and other towns in this part of Sicily, an earthquake in 1693 destroyed just about everything. But, the cities were rebuilt and new construction was influenced by the latest in Italian fashion of the time: Baroque architectural style!

You can go down by steps or walking on the sidewalk or a little of both. We decided to go down some and got not quite 1/2 way down and knew we had to go back up. We saw no buses so rather than killing ourselves we turned around and went back up going a different way. Some steps, some walkway and all of it uphill! Legs are in great shape for sure!

The walk back to the apartment was not all a physical thing. Several times our minds drifted away from sore muscles, like artwork on homes and other buildings. Nice ceramic tile layout on one of the houses, fancy, an apartment with colorful crates all over it (no idea what this was about but it was cute) and a window grill built around the symbol of Sicily, the Trinacria.

There were no restaurants open and we did not have much for breakfast so we were a little hungry – well there was a pizzeria open when we hit the 1/2 way mark but it was still far enough down that we decided hey missing one day of a good meal won’t kill us so we went to the hotel and ate oranges, chips and cookies and lots of water. We were so tired we really didn’t care and we slept really well.