SICILY Cefalu' and Agrigento--the Valley of the Temples

After staying in Marsala a few days while David worked, we went sight-seeing. First stop was in Cefalu’ to take a little hike up a hill to an ancient temple dedicated to Diana (Greek goddess). The hike up the mountain in Cefalu’ was rather enjoyable after being in the hotel for a couple days and in the car awhile. The trial was pretty steep up and had cactus everywhere (all of Sicily does, with lots of prickly pear fruit to offer). There were awesome ruins atop dangerous precipises all the way up. When we got to the temple, I was blown away to see how old it was (5th century BC) WOW! Most of what we saw afterward dated close to this time-period.

For our boys the most memorable part of this trip was on the way down. They all had to go to the bathroom and there wasn’t one handy. There was a patch of cactus near the edge of the path, so they all (David included) did the Italian thing and just went—they did try to be discreet by stepping as far as they could into the cactus covering. This spot became the later mapping point as we looked back at the hill from a distance, “See that spot on the edge over there? That is where we went to the bathroom. Can you believe how high we were?” The statement, “you mean the place we peed?” was made more than once that day as we talked about the temple on the hill—lovely. Sorry, Diana.

Velle dei Tempii. I was really excited to see these ancient temples, especially since there were so many of them right near each other and one was particulalry well-preserved.

The boys were thrilled with all the outside time on this trip. Of course, they ran past the first ancient temple to get to prime “mountain lion” leaping and prowling territory on the old Olive tree and then the partially crumbled walls nearby.
It was such an incredible experience. The temples and walls were truly awesome. The age of these buildings was a hard thing for me to grasp, let alone the boys, but I think they understood that it was all really cool old stuff. We all loved it, and even Gabriel waited until just before the last stop to crumple to the ground declaring that he was unable to move and needed to be carried (thus david ended up with one on his back in the pack and one on his front in his arms for at least some of the walk down).