Casa Vacanza Conte Ruggero With Terraces: Apartment Rental, 2 Bedrooms, Sleeps 4 in Mascali

We found the apartment to be well equipped, clean, convenient and spacious. It turned out to be larger than we expected from the description on the the website. The journey from the airport was fairly simple, we did however manage to get ourselves lost on arrival in
Mascali. We both felt pretty silly the next morning when we realized just how simple it should have been.
Once you have worked where you are in relationship to the SS114 driving to and from anywhere is fairly straightforward.
Maria proved to be a reliable, friendly, welcoming and generous hostess. Nothing was too much trouble.
Mascali prove to be a good base to see this side of Sicily from. We had visited Sicily several times before and knew exactly what we wanted to see. We can recommend Taormina as a must see - a truly lovely town. Acireale - not quite so cutesy attractive but certainly worth while exploring. Catania is a large sprawl (We drove to Giarre and caught the train from there) - driving to or through Catania is not for the fainthearted! Ortygia is worth the drive as is Noto. The medieval quarter of Enna is worth the effort. For something different we tried the non motorway route, SS192, and the drive was as fascinating as the destination. We'd like to be able to sing the praises of Mt Etna but for the 2nd time we drove up it only to find everything shrouded in cloud and visibility down to a few feet - a reasonable reason to plan another trip to Sicily in the future.
Giarre is a pleasant little town for shopping and we found a lovely chocolate/coffee shop on Corso Italia, on the right hand side of the road as you drive down toward the train station.
On this trip the weather on Sicily was worse than the weather we had left behind on the Isle of Wight (a freak autumn on both islands ensured this) but having a comfortable apartment with a bottle of Baileys (a gift from Maria) to return to after a long day driving and walking was a good way to end the day. Thank you Maria.