Vagabonda:

I believe you are the expert. If you would be so kind, please critique our itinerary:

Arrive Palermo Monday, September 29 – Tuesday, September 30 – (2) nights in Palermo
Hotel Ambasciatori (is this a good location?)

Rent van in Palermo
Wednesday, October 1 - Drive to Monreale (1/2 day)

Arrive in Cefalu October 1 – (1) night

We want to see the ruins – we have one night to play with – where would you suggest?

From what town would it be best to see Villa Romana del Casale?

Taormina 3 nights (October 3 – October 6)
Mt. Etna
Hotel La Pensione Svizzera (I read that you recommended this hotel to some on the forum before. Is there another place you would recommend with sea views other than Hotel Villa Schuler which is very expensive.

Leave from Catania October 6, 2008

Is there anything we are missing? We are a party of six adults traveling together? We want to rent a van, but only one person drives a manual transmission. Not sure about hiring a driver. What would you suggest? Thank you.

Vagabonda is the Sicily expert at www.tripadvisor.com.

And Zerlina is one of the experts on Sicily who posts on this forum. Unless you want ONLY Vagabonda's input, you might consider reposting!

Welcome to Fodors. There is no "Sicily forum" - no Italy forum, nor Germany, England -- or any other country. Just "Europe".

I would re-post w/ a title something like "Need help w/ 7 day visit to Sicily"

I disagree. There are specific forums for different countries and topics. It is not all done on the generic Europe topic. You will get many more posters if you chose a specific topic. Example Sicily, Provence, Paris ect.

Nametaken: Sorry - but you are confused how Fodors works. There are Forums -- Europe, United States, Asia, etc. But there are NO forums for any specific countries (or states w/i the US).

And there are no forums for regions -- Sicily, Greek Isles, Bavaria or whatever - none.

Clicking on a country merely allows one to search for <u>some</u> of the threads about that country. The only threads that do display when one clicks &quot;Italy&quot; foe instance -- are those where the OP remembered to click Italy BEFORE they started their post.

Right, janis.

I wish it were possible to either have the search function retrieve <i>all</i> the posts on that topic, whether designated or not, or eliminate the 'topics' box altogether.

My bad. However, their are search term and topics which can assist in narrowing down posts of interest, such as country, town, places of interest etc.

Excuse the grammar. I meant to type There are--not their.

I'm not an expert, but why rent a van to get to Monreale - it is an easy and short bus ride from Palermo. Similarly Cefal&uacute; is an hour by train. You could save yourself two days rental and pick a vehicle up at Cefal&uacute;.

By &quot;The Ruins&quot;, I presume you mean Agrigento or Selinunte - the former being slightly easier to get to. YOu can do both as a daytrip (We did it from Cefal&uacute, but it is a long day.

If you are in the west of the Island and heading East to Taormina, you may well wish to stop off at Piazza armerina on the way to see the Roman mosaics - it is not a huge detour of the main route.

This is one of the pet peeve I have with the Fodor's Talk forums. There are only the major ones so all the European Countries are under one Europe Forum. Of course you can do a search within the forum.

Tripadvisor in that respect is easier to search - they have Europe forum, then Italy, and within Italy, you can click on &quot;jump to specific forum&quot; and pick specific cities within Italy.

The downside is that sometimes when one talks/asks about travel from one city to another within Italy, the post may reside in one city's forum but not the other.

That issue comes up regularly. The consensus seems to be to leave things as is - except to improve the search function, of course. (which Fodors is going to work on)

So many trips include more than one country - it is hard enough to get folks to click one country. To have to click say France, Italy, and Switzerland - or Ireland, UK and France -- ain't gonna happen.