A Primer to Driving in Sicily: Picking Up Your Car from the Trapani Airport

The Trapani Airport is by far my favourite Sicilian airport.  If you go to the official website you will see there is no map.  That is because you don't need one.  It is a tiny, tiny airport.  There is no circling waiting for a runway, and when we landed we walked in to no immigration and no customs!  That was a surprise!  This is because it is mainly a domestic airport.  I checked the flights in and out for today.  Eleven flights in, eleven flights out for the whole day and only one in and one out were not domestic.  There are only four airlines that use Trapani: Ryan Air, Darwin Airline, AirOne, and Alitalia.  Ryan Air reports having flights from all over Europe flying into Trapani.  I can't comment on that as we have only flown from Beauvais, just outside of Paris.  Darwin Air and AirOne only fly domestically to Trapani.  Alitalia has connections all over the world so flying into Trapani shouldn't be a problem.

One of the nice things about Trapani is once you pick up your luggage and walk into the main part of the airport, the car rental desks are right in front of you.  Our experience was that there was no English speaking clerk there so Nick was brought into service and did all the negotiations in terms of renting the car.  

We arrived from Canada so walking out into the HOT July heat of Sicily was a shock.  It was also a shock walking to the very far end of the parking lot to pick up our little Ford Fiesta.  

The really nice part of driving out of Trapani Airport is that it is beautiful and there is no traffic to speak of.  This gave me some time to get used to driving in an unfamiliar place until we hit the real traffic.  We were heading to Agrigento so we decided not to take the autostrada, but to take the regional highway to the south.  This turned out to be the best choice as we had some amazing views.

Almost no traffic!  Even the signpost thinks we are going the right way!

This view had us squealing!  You don't see this in Canada!

Again, more Greek architecture that had me drooling!

Not the best picture of our first glimpse of the Mediterranean
but considering we were driving and had nowhere to stop , it's not bad.

We took a side road that went by the Turkish Steps or La Scala dei Turchi.
The houses there were spectacular, as was the view!