Whirlwind of a day, part uno

Well we are a few days late in posting this (time is at a premium), but we have lots to share from our first full day in Italy.  We started the day taking a 45 minute drive to Segesta (with Matt braving the hills, NARROW drives, and crazy scooters..with a stick and the largest van in Sicily.  We actually had a trunk!).  Segesta is besta says Joanna.  It is a 5th Century BC doric temple that you can see here:

It was quite a hike to get there (we WILL have awesome legs after this trip).  Check out a shot of the way up - this photo doesn't do it justice, but trust me, it was a hike!!!

After we made our way back down, we set off to visit Franco in Carini.  Franco lives on a side road with the smallest driveway known to man.  It might have been fine if we had a typical car in Europe, but no, we had this van that was big even for American standards.  Long story short, we left a memory on our Fiat minivan...
Oops.

Honestly, this driveway was TINY....cute though, right???

Franco, Matt and Joanna's relative, was a fabulous host.  He took us to a cute little restaurant called Pirata.  This restaraunt could have been the set for Pirates of the Caribbean.   It was AWESOME.  Now onto the food...well the food was fabulous.  We had about 6 courses.  We started with a fish Antipasti (fried squid, sardines, oysters, mussels, fried broccoli, pannella, eggplant, veal meatballs - yummy sauce), then we had our  pasta course (eggplant and fish in a red sauce, linguine and clams), followed by our fish course (it was a white fish that we think was called Orate - yummy.  The fish was served whole and we had to grab the yumminess.  We also had some head  to tail shrimp that may have been the best I've ever tasted.  I think there was some calamari in this course as well).  I forgot to say we were full after the appetizer!   We had the whole thing with some white wine.  We ended with lemon sorbet.  Nice refreshing end.

Shot of Tim and Joanna with the fish course:

Day isn't over yet...we still have to head to Palermo!   I'll leave this post with a shot of Franco and Matt:

Thanks for being such a fab host, Franco!

Stay tuned....