S2 Chapter 1: In Which We Reflect on our Winter and Try (and Fail) to be Vaccinated in Sicily

Hello friends! We are baaacccckkk and ready to start Season 2 aboard Gradisca!! Before we dive right into our newest Sicilian adventures, I’ll do a little catch-up for those of you who (understandably) may have forgotten the minute details of last season. Basically, after spending June through November of last year sailing from Crete, the southernmost island in Greece, up through the Aegean, around the Pelopponese peninsula, through the Ionian Greek islands and then across the Ionian Sea, we ended our season in Sicily. In the little town of Licata, we packed up the boat for the winter and flew from Sicily to Tenerife to spend the winter in Ángel’s hometown of La Laguna, Tenerife where we ended up staying there from November 8 for almost seven months until June 2. 

When we left in November, did we know we’d be in Tenerife so long? Definitely not. But with things in Europe only now coming out of the third wave of COVID lockdowns, we decided to wait before going back on the boat until things were a little more open. And we also had some projects in Tenerife that kept us pretty busy (more on that below). 

Spending seven months in Tenerife was an incredible mixed bag of blessings and challenges. On the positive side:

Number 1: We got to spend tons of quality time with Ángel’s family and friends. Since Ángel lived in the U.S. from 2010-2020, visits home were usually only for a couple weeks at most, so it was really special for us to spend such a sustained period of time near his family. And when I say “near,” I mean LITERALLY living in the apartment across the hallway from his brother and in the building across the street from his parents. Yes, it sometimes felt like we were living in a 90’s sitcom with family members ducking in and out of each other’s houses exchanging bags of laundry (my mother-in-law insisted on washing our sheets and towels for the entirety of our stay; at first I protested thinking it was some kind of test and then I just learned to shut up and appreciate it), food, bits of gossip, and photos of the family’s first grandchild who we are all obsessed with. 

Adventures with la familia!!

We were able to be there in person for many holidays: Christmas, his mom’s birthday, New Years, Father’s Day, Easter, and Mother’s Day. Many years we would have also experienced Carnival in February, which is a big deal here in the Canaries, but obviously this year, it was canceled. (Booo COVID.) 

And speaking of COVID….

Number 2: COVID Safety. The Canary Islands were one of the safest places in Europe COVID-wise and they’re one of the most temperate climates during winter, so we really enjoyed a rare level of freedom. We could eat outside in terraces, go for long hikes, and live somewhat normal lives. We felt really lucky because we knew that so many of our family and friends were having small Thanksgivings or Christmas and our friends in many parts of Europe have been stuck in very strict third-wave lockdowns.  

We were even able to do a little bit of traveling within the Canary Islands. I visited three other islands for the first time: Lanzarote, Gran Canaria, and La Gomera and I can finally understand the Canarian saying that “Cada isla tiene su encanto” meaning that each island has its own charm. Tenerife has vertiginous lush green mountains and the impressive volcanic peak El Teide (the highest mountain in Spain), a burgeoning wine culture, and many beautiful historic towns (my favorites are all in the north: the capital city of Santa Cruz, La Orotava, Garachico, Taganana, Candelaria, and of course La Laguna). 

Northern Tenerife landscapes

Lanzarote is MUCH more arid and has over 1,000 volcanoes, some of which remained very active as recently as 200 years ago. Much of the island is still barren lava rock, but this stark Mars-red landscape is offset dramatically by the island’s all-white villages. Lanzarote’s wild landscape also served as inspiration for the incredible architect and artist Cesar Manrique who left his mark all over the island. 

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Some of the elegant indoor-outdoor spaces designed by Manrique

The island of Gran Canaria may not have the striking natural beauty of some of the other islands, but its capital city of Las Palmas is well worth a visit. It is the most cosmopolitan city in the Canaries with excellent international cuisine.

Also, much like Sicily and Crete, Las Palmas has a fascinating history as a nexus for international trade as European ships would stop to provision before catching the trade winds across the Atlantic to the New World. Columbus stopped in Las Palmas for provisions on several of his voyages (or so they say, obviously other islands also claim this honor as well) and there is an excellent museum in the Columbus house detailing American-Canarian relations, something with which we obviously have some familiarity!

My personal favorite part of Las Palmas, however, was the house of renowned Spanish author Benito Pérez Galdós, born in Las Palmas and later resident in Madrid and Santander. Pérez Galdós was kind of like Spain’s Charles Dickens (and in fact Pérez Galdós was a big fan of Dickens, even translating some of his works to Spanish). Like Dickens, he wrote installments of long sagas in the newspapers and the nation was enthralled by his portrayals of Spaniards of different social classes and his commentary on the country’s political and religious life. His family house in Las Palmas includes his vast and beautiful personal library with works of international authors like Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, and many others.

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Our final island was the little round island of La Gomera. The climate and terrain of La Gomera are a lot like Tenerife with similar wet and dry sides of the island, but it’s far less built up because it’s almost impossibly steep everywhere you look. From above it looks like an orange squeezer: a giant round cone peaking in the center with deep ravines flowing out from the central point. This mountainous interior made it historically very challenging to traverse with its coastal towns only reachable by boat. Ángel and I spent a (mostly) gloriously relaxing weekend with his parents in the tranquil seaside town of Valle Gran Rey (the modifier “mostly” being necessary since sitting in the back seat of Ángel’s father’s car throughout the nerve-wrackingly steep and winding drive from the ferry port in San Sebastian to Valle Gran Rey took about 4 years off my life. For those of you who have ever feared for your life while Ángel is driving, I will only say that his inabilities in this department are genetic.).  

The charming island of La Gomera

Number 3: Apartment renovations. Back in 2019 just before COVID hit, Ángel and I bought two properties in Tenerife with the intention of renovating them and renting them out. But since building was delayed by COVID, we were able to use our time in the Canaries to finish and furnish one of them for renters and to almost complete renovations in the other, subdividing it into two separate apartments plus renovating the attic. We both (but especially Ángel) worked our butts off on this project and we’re pretty pleased with the results though we sadly had to leave before things were totally finished so you’ll have to stay tuned for the dramatic before/after shots.  But I’ll give a few teasers below.

Here are some “before” shots of the apartment we renovated. It was a four-bedroom with 1 kitchen, and 2 bathrooms, one of which was off of the (very ugly) patio. As you can see, the kitchen and bathrooms were rather dated and the ceilings had some water damage.

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So then we started knocking things down….

To a Californian, who is used to houses being framed in wood and earthquake safety being the most important concern, it was fascinating to watch how things are built elsewhere. Concrete walls came down and went back up in the blink of an eye and here materials like cement, tile and metal are much more important than wood since there’s no earthquake risk and the island’s humidity is the number one building concern.

We subdivided the apartment into two separate apartments each with a kitchen and bath. They’re not fully done but here are two videos we took before we left:

Lest you get carried away though thinking that we’re some kind of superhumans, this was no DIY effort. This was a serious renovation undertaken by our fabulous foreman Alfredo and his team of wonderful workmen…. but under the watchful and ever-so-slightly obsessive eye of my dear husband. We were sad to leave before everything was completely finished but we know it’s in very capable hands. And we know this because Ángel still talks to them on the phone pretty much every day. Which I’m sure they love. (Sorry Alfredo!)

Number 4: Time to write. One of my most idiotic notions from our first season aboard was that we’d have a lot of time on the boat for personal projects. Reading back on my early journal entries and blog posts now makes me laugh. I naively thought that our new jobless lives would leave tons of time for language learning, writing, video making, honestly I think I thought I’d take up quilting (???) But really, between all the boat work, the actual sailing, the boat work, the constant planning and backup planning, the boat work, all of our adventures exploring on land, AND DID I MENTION THE BOAT WORK, we collapse into bed most nights completely spent with hardly enough energy left to reliably wash my hair, much less to write the next great American novel. Keeping this blog was about all I could commit to and as you all saw, my efforts in that department grew progressively more tardy.

But I am delighted to report that while in Tenerife, I had A LOT of free time and I began writing my first novel. Writing a novel has been a lifelong Bucket List goal for me, and while I’m still just dipping my toes into the project, I can say that so far I vacillate between finding it a ton of fun and paralyzingly impossible.

A couple times each week, while my diligent husband would go up to our apartment to oversee the progress, I would take the bus down to Santa Cruz and walk, trusty laptop packed into my backpack, down to the library where I’d proceed to sit in my little assigned chair (COVID rules again) and type out nonsense that maybe someday will be a readable story. The best thing about this was if I got my 600 words done before 1 p.m., I could make it back to the bus stop by 1:20 when a nearby school would let out. This school, for some inexplicable and completely amazing reason, played (and when I say played, I mean BLARED) the Indiana Jones theme song over their loudspeaker. I want you to imagine, dear reader, that as the school let out and kids streamed forth joyously from the schoolyard, the triumphant notes pour forth “dun duh nuh nuh dun duh NUH, dun duh nuh, dun duh NUHHHH”  And there I’d be, striding down the street, proud of my 600 words and filled with a swelling joy as the music crescendoed, feeling like I could go conquer the world. 

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Number 5: Good practice for my life as a future expat/immigrant to Spain. Finally, living for a sustained period of time in the Canaries was excellent practice for when we eventually move to Madrid. I confirmed that I can comfortably, if imperfectly, conduct my life in Spanish. Each appointment (the dentist! the gynecologist! the hairdresser! the facialist!) felt like a new hurdle overcome as my vocabulary solidified and I more or less spoke in the correct verb tense. Did I once show up two hours late to an appointment because two p.m. (las dos) and noon (las doce) sound basically the same in Canarian-accented Spanish? Absolutely. Did I confidently declare to my brother-in-law that I was doing “the lavender” instead of the laundry? Yes again. But did I persevere? Yes (after sulking). And by the end, I’d say that while my Spanish is still not fluent, I’m certainly getting more comfortable both with the language and the culture. 

But it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. Spending seven months in the Canaries certainly had its challenges as well. Our top three difficulties were:

Number 1: Isolation. Just as our greatest blessing was to spend so much time with Canarian family and friends, our greatest challenge was missing family and friends back in the U.S. and abroad. We never anticipated that our move to Europe would coincide with a global pandemic that would make our cross-border families seem so… distant. Many of you know that in addition to my parents and extended family living in California, my brother and his girlfriend live in Australia and one of Ángel’s brothers, his wife, and our new niece live in China. In both of these countries, the borders are pretty firmly closed and even the border between the U.S. and Europe is just opening up now. In many ways, COVID made what likely would have always been a major transition seem even more dramatic.

And even without COVID, the Canaries would probably always have felt pretty isolated. Geographically, this remote island chain is one of the most isolated parts of Europe. Online shopping has barely caught on because I swear NOTHING SHIPS THERE (Australia, I finally feel your pain) and the culture is a bit insular with most Canarians preferring their tranquilo lifestyle to the bustling Spanish peninsula (and yes, if you’re surprised to hear mainland Spain described as bustling, then you understand the level of tranquilo we’re talking about here). Unlike a thriving metropolis like Madrid, the expats living in the Canaries tend more toward the 60+ British and German retiree set so my prospects of making many foreigner friends were a bit limited. 

Number 2:  Feeling rootless. Seven months is a lot of time to question yourself when you’re living in a random Spanish island off the coast of Africa with no job, only a couple friends, a tenuous, if improving, grasp on the language, and a “plan” that is comically impossible to explain to anyone. “Oh yes we’re here in Tenerife renovating apartments while we wait to go back to our boat in Sicily so we can go sailing before moving to Madrid.” I think most people probably just assumed that they misunderstood some part of what I was saying. Having the apartments and our personal projects gave us some focus, but there were days when we felt very much at loose ends, wondering if we’d ever finish renovating the apartments, if Covid would ever end, if we’d ever make it back to the boat, and if anything we were doing made any sense. 

Number 3: Vaccines (or lack thereof). I assume that all of my American readers at this point are vaccinated or at least have had the opportunity to be vaccinated, but things in Europe are a good way behind. By the time we left Tenerife, Ángel’s parents had just finished their second dose of the vaccine and the first appointments for the end of June were only just beginning to open up for our age group. With a planned departure of June 2, this wasn’t going to work for us. So we knew we had to take our chances in Italy or maybe even Greece. 

Which brings us to our return to Sicily! Oh Sicily. Land of contrasts. The elegant streets lined with wheat-colored neo-classical facades carved from (eroding)limestone and adorned with deep green shutters and wrought iron balconies looming grandly over sidewalks heaped in garbage and dog shit from the limping, mangy strays whose sweet and hopeful faces just break your heart. 

Gone are the gentle Canarians who slow their cars 50 meters away from the crosswalk and encouragingly flash their turn signal to say “please cross, my friend, I’ll happily wait,” and back are the teenage lunatics careening wildly on whining mopeds through Licata’s back alleys, who cackle as they almost run you down, and legitimately make me feel like an old person as I shake my fist and curse these Reckless Youths. But back too are the morning cappucino and cornetto, the afternoon snack of arancino or granita, and the dinners of pizza…or more pizza (literally every restaurant is a pizzeria- this is not an exaggeration) so we go back and forth in a constant whiplash of being dazzled and disgusted. 

I’ve heard that all of Italy is like this: a complete contrast between the beautiful and the wretched and I think in Sicily and Southern Italy that is even more true. Added to that, we’re in kind of the southern backwater of Sicily so the contrast here is really quite stark. Even simple things like recycling haven’t made their way to Licata. On one particularly comical evening, the Licatesi (as the inhabitants of Licata are known) were out in full Friday night finery while I was wandering around in my dingy boat clothes clutching a couple of empty beer bottles, searching for a recycling can, but looking for all the world like a vagrant alcoholic. I got more than a few stares of concern. But now I can happily report that I’ve finally found one site about a mile away where I can drop off plastic and glass containers and cross my fingers that they aren’t just dumped in the same trash pile as everything else.

And so this is our life in Sicily. Sometimes I’m cursing this place, looking homeless and hot (temperature, certainly not attractive level) as I drag my recycling a mile in the summer heat. But other times it takes my breath away as the sun sets and the sky turns a deep, soft purple dotted with bright salmon colored clouds. Starlings swoop and cry against a backdrop of church towers and Licata’s own little hilltop castle, and I stop to take my four hundredth picture of the marina at sunset.  

When we arrived back in Licata on June 3, we made the (wildly naive) choice to journey to the Licata hospital to see whether we would be eligible to receive vaccines. Italy had just opened up appointments that day to our age group and we figured we’d go and ask if we could qualify. When we arrived, we were greeted by two Red Cross volunteers and Ángel explained our situation in his quite passable, if heavily Spanish-influenced, Italian. They told us to fill out the form and that we could go up and receive the Johnson & Johnson shot that afternoon. We couldn’t believe our luck. We filled out the papers, leaving the section for our Italian health card number blank since we didn’t have one. 

But when we got up to the fifth floor, we were told by the second round screener that we did not qualify because we didn’t have the health card. However, she went and talked to someone else who determined that since we are resident in the Marina we would qualify if the Marina would issue each of us a “codice fiscale” which I thought meant postal code, but as Ángel informed me, this is apparently some kind of a national identifier number. 

We thanked them, went the next morning to get our codice fiscale numbers from the marina, and then walked the two miles back to the hospital. We didn’t know however that the morning was for appointments and not walk-ins and so the hospital staff turned us away. Two doctors in particular seemed angry that we were there in the morning. We tried to apologize and to explain that we didn’t know that walk-ins were only in the afternoon, but it was hard to know how much of Ángel’s Italian and my mute pantomiming they understood. That afternoon, we made the long walk again out to the hospital, and armed with our codici fiscali, we felt sure that this time we were going to succeed. 

And we almost did. We zipped through the paperwork, showing our codici fiscali and Italian cell phone number. The intake attendant made small talk with us, telling me he wants to visit San Francisco someday as he reviewed my paperwork. We were feeling all peppy and confident. Our paperwork was approved. We were in the line. Then we were in the examination room. Then I was sitting in the chair, ready for the jab feeling all the swelling emotions of “finally, FINALLY this Covid thing is going to be over” and feeling grateful for the worldwide efforts to vaccinate. And then the two doctors from the day before came in and looked daggers at us. They asked for our health cards and we told them we didn’t have health cards and explained that the intake nurses had gotten the codici fiscali from the Marina. The doctors took our paperwork and had someone look up our codes on the computer. They didn’t work. We tried to explain that maybe since they’d just been issued that morning, there was a problem. But then the intake nurse asked if we had registered the codes with the tax agency, and we said we hadn’t. She gave us the name of the agency and we determined that since it was Friday afternoon, we’d go on Monday. 

On Monday, we were about to set off for the agency (another 40 minute walk each way- anyone who’s wondering how we’ve both dropped weight since arriving back in Italy even with the daily intake of pizza and gelato will begin to see why), when Ángel decided to check online if our codes were working. He found a website that verifies the codes and both of ours checked out. Terrific. 

That afternoon, we went back for the fourth time to the hospital, but we were greeted with two pieces of bad news. (1) Our codes may have been valid on the website Ángel found but they were still invalid at the hospital and (2) the hospital had run out of the J&J shot for walk-ins and now had Pfizer which meant that if and when we eventually get our codes to work, we may not be able to get the one-jab vaccine anymore and we may have to decide if we want to prolong our stay to get 2 shots of Pfizer.

We left feeling deflated and confused. We felt like salmon swimming upstream, wondering how many times we’d trek back and forth to the hospital only to return empty-handed. After some tears followed by a solacing sweet almond granita served alongside fresh buttery brioche, we decided that we were pushing it too much and that we should let the initial onslaught of Licatesi youth come and get their vaccines and then we will try again in a few weeks before we leave. Or we won’t. We’ll see.

I know this may sound defeatist to an American, but I think that’s because in the States there is an ingrained sense of fairness. We are taught that if you follow the rules and you keep trying, you will succeed. But here, things feel more arbitrary. It felt like a lucky break that we got as close as we did and when it was snatched away from us, it felt just as capricious. It was hard not to take it personally because it really felt like the doctors were trying to come up with a reason not to vaccinate us. And I know this all may sound entitled since we don’t have Italian health cards, and I’m sure that was how we came across to them- young, rich foreigners with a boat coming and taking vaccines from locals- and perhaps they were trying to just do their job. 

But at some level, it felt like a betrayal to have doctors, who swear an oath to care for people, spend more time figuring out how to deny us the vaccine than it possibly could have taken to just administer it and move on. It shook my confidence to feel so unwelcome and so undeserving of care, and it made me feel on a very personal level for the first time how dehumanizing it must be for immigrants all over the world when their immigration status is used to deny their access to basic human services. It was the first time I’d ever found myself on the outside of the system, denied access to healthcare, and knowing that this is a reality for many people around the world was a sobering experience. 

To shake this feeling of disillusionment, we threw ourselves into preparing Gradisca for her second season in the Med. And I must say, we’ve come a long way from last summer. Last time we arrived in the dead of night and began with a memorable (disastrous may be more accurate) 7-day quarantine in which we had no supplies, no prior knowledge of the boat and her systems, and really no idea what we were getting ourselves into. This time, we breezed into the marina office and got our keyfob for the showers and our electric shore power turned on; we sanitized and filled the water tanks; flipped on the propane line; plugged into shore power; and boom, we were back in business. 

In the first week and a half after we got back, we cleaned the decks and the cockpit, polished the gelcoat, cleaned out the plumbing for the sinks in the galley and the head, changed the valves for the toilet (well, halfway changed them; more on that another day), worked with Matt to finish some of the electrical and engine work we’d hired him to do while we were away, and generally did some spring cleaning down and rearranging below now that we know how we want the boat set up. We have a few more tasks before we’ll feel ready for our shakedown sail, but all in all we’re making good progress.

Returning to the boat always brings a certain chaos as things have to be put back together.

I could really feel the strain though after eight straight days of boatwork. My back and knees were sore from all the scrubbing and I acquired a truly dreadful back tan when I asked a distracted Ángel to sunscreen my back and ended up with:

Ángel’s entire body was sore since he’s six sizes too large to comfortably do any boat projects. Days of pretzeling himself under, over, and alongside the sinks, toilet, grey water tank, battery bank, and engine left him a bit cranky and with quite a few bumps and bruises as he readjusts to the constant ducking that is boat life for tall people (I wouldn’t know). 

Fun times crouching with pipes.

So to avoid burnout, we are gave ourselves last week off and adventured up to the north of Sicily to explore a little on land. We had a fabulous time and I’ll share (proselytize?) my absolute obsession with Palermo in the next chapter. But that’s all to say we’re trying to learn from last year’s mistakes and go a little slower, take things just a little easier. Or maybe it’s just the newfound Canarian girl in me coming out, starting to live a little more tranquila.

Either way, welcome back aboard, friends. I think it’s going to be a wonderful season.