Ragusa Sicily

I'm fairly sure that most of these hitch-hiking tales will be news to most of you.
Maybe I've bored you to tears with anecdotes and musings of my post-adolescant ramblings; but there was one Christmas holiday towards the end of college when I really didn't want to do turkey and auld-lang-syne with my parents. The minute I arrived I knew it was going to be not what I wanted to do. My mind was elsewhere. Several hundred miles elsewhere as it happened, and as with homing pigeons and migrating species I joined the ranks of disatisfied creatures knowing they had to be somewhere else. And my reasons for wanting to be somewhere else pretty much coincided with the homing pigeon and migrating species. I'm not saying that I felt the need to breed exactly. That's not quite the word. If a pigeon (say a blue-bar hen) is sitting on an egg. She's going to bust a gut and spare nothing to fly hundreds of miles to get back onto that egg. That's why blue-bar hens returning to eggs win so many races. However testosterone and hormones mixed in with some unedifying lust caused me to set out in late December from Redruth in Cornwall bound for Ragusa in Southern Sicily. You guessed it. I had a girl-friend from college who went to Sicily to teach English (TEFL) My parents were utterly horrified. They had never been abroad in their lives. They were totally gob-smacked!! In fact for a few moments now and then I suspected that if they knew one they would have booked some sessions with a psychiatrist.
All these years later I have very vague memories of where I crossed the Channel. Having hitched in France many times this trip blurs into so many others. I remember hitching past Firenze whilst wondering where Florence might be and I remember some dodgy mateys around Naples. Sure it was cold but I had a good coat and warm scarf and I finally got on the ferry to Sicily.
We had the most wonderful Christmas in her flat with her flat-mates, two of whom were gay. But it was great. We played Pink Floyd albums and brewed coffee in those hexagonal metal caffatierre things. Sorry to disappoint here. I was never into drugs, joints, hash or cocaine.
I will blog later about the trip back (which I remember with some clarity) but suffice to say she and I were not destined to become an item. Her brother, bless him, some months later gently broke it to me that she had dumped me for an Italian Stallion. I don't kmow the Italian for "Such is life".