Palermo and Cefalù Day Trip from Taormina

This is a really, really long day, so be prepared to be tired. The journey to to Palermo takes around 4 hours, and the coach doesn't have a toilet so makes a stop at a service station. Palermo is a nice enough city but nothing spectacular and, while I'm glad I've seen it, it probably wasn't worth the time/money in the end. In hindsight I probably would have liked more time to explore on my own, instead of follow the walking tour that we were taken on. This walking tour consisted of quite a long time spent in two different churches, and a very quick walk through the market. To be honest there are other things I would have liked to see, and I'm not sure why it was necessary to spend so much time in two churches I've got nothing against churches, but one is generally enough. And the market was quite small and run-down - certainly no better than you'd see in any other city. Also it's a grocery market rather than a street-food market, so you can't really buy anything. The suggested lunch restaurant is nice, with reasonable prices and good pizza you don't have to go there and can go elsewhere if you prefer. Cefalu is a nice place and, again, was worth seeing, but to be honest it's not as nice as Taormina. To be honest there are quite a few better and cheaper, and less tiring things you can do with your time if visiting Taormina. But this was OK.

Long road trip. The guide lost me and 2 other people while passing through the market! We found the gruop after 2 hrs. The tour stoped at touristic restaurant where they tried to cheat us on the bill.

This was a very fast way to see a little bit of both places. We were lucky enough to have an actual tour guide Rossana give us a quick tour around Palermo with a lot of information. It was nice to have a local guide. The sights were somewhat interesting but as I mentioned it is a very quick overview. We had lunch at Restaurant 59. It was very good, but as some others mentioned, it is expensive. I ordered lasagna with a side, and Coke Light as a beverage, and the Coke Light came in a very tiny bottle so I ordered two, not realizing that it cost 4 euros a bottle! Then there is also the cover charge of 2 euros just to eat inside, but that is very typical of most places, so I can't fault them for that. I will say the lasagna was worth what I paid for it, but if you eat lunch there you may want to order something else as a beverage. I also had the tempura style vegetables and those were good. After that, we were off to Cefalu, which I thought was much more scenic than Palermo, and even more scenic that Panarea and Stromboli which I had visited earlier in the week. It was a long day, but nice to get a taste of what these two places were like in case I want to come back for a future visit. The only somewhat negative point is that the tour was conducted in three languages, which makes the explanation times a bit long and cumbersome. We were a large enough group that we could have had an English-speaking guide and German-speaking guide. There were a couple of Spanish speakers who got by with Italian. Other than that, it was a nice tour.

Graet tor and round trip. Impressed by multi-language skills of guide who filled us in with al lsorts of information.