October 13th, 2025

Good morning friends,

  My talk about being a solo and handicapped traveler was well received and a very successful event. A REALLY big thanks goes to Julie’s handling of the technical side of things and to all the help we got from Allison Lindsay our latest employee. The speech was given to the Charlestown Senior Living Center in Maryland, a wonderful assembly of senior citizens who are living life to the fullest. As I promised last week, here is the contents of the speech with some of the pictures. It is really quite long but I promised I would publish it here if anyone wants to take the time to read it. Much of it you may have already read in past John’s Corners, as I gleaned quite a bit from my writings from last year. As always, I welcome your feedback. 

ADVENTURES IN SICILY

    Good afternoon,  first of all I would like to thank Sib Petix and the Charlestown Senior Living Community for inviting me into your space. Sib followed my adventure as a solo/senior/disabled traveler on Facebook and invited me to speak to you. This is not something normally I do. It’s a little bit out of my zone so bear with me as I tell you the story of a disabled man who regained his love for travel and became a  wheelchair warrior.

      My name is John Bernunzio and I hail from a large Sicilian enclave with deep  roots on the east side of Rochester, NY. My family is comprised mostly of immigrants from Sicily. My grandfather was a baker. He and my grandmother started their bakery in 1923. They were married when she was only 16! She was the oldest of 12 kids living in a tiny little city house and she desperately wanted to get out.  So they married, had their kids and raised their family around the bakery. They purchased an enormous old house with a bakery building next door. So life was always centered around baking bread and preparing meals for a large family. Her house was referred to as Grand Central station as people were always coming in and out at all hours. 

My mother and father married on October 12, 1946, right after the war, and one year later, to the day, I was born, the first of 6 children and 20 grandchildren. As a young child, I lived with my parents upstairs from my grandparents.  By then my entire family was involved in the bakery… my father had married into this family of bakers. My two uncles, Charlie and Vinny Randisi, were bakers, and together they had a very successful business for many years in the Rochester area. Today, my brother Pat owns a very established bakery in Rochester called Leo’s. 

      But,  I was the one to go to college. My mother would always tell me you don’t want to have to work hard like your father. You don’t want to come home dirty and you don’t want to have to work at night when your kids are sleeping.  You want to get a nice "clean" job and go to college. So I went to a Jesuit High School and a Basilian college. I guess I wanted to become some kind of professor, probably because I liked talking so much. 

       Well, as far as I got was a professor of "special education", teaching very young boys with learning disabilities and behavioral issues. I was a teacher for 20 years in the Rochester area at several different schools. While working as a teacher, I also collected antique musical instruments. I would buy them at flea markets, fix them up and then sell them….eventually I had so many that I started a small mail order business.

I’ve always liked old things. My whole life I have surrounded myself with old things, it has been the business of my life. I was an antique dealer for a brief spell. Now I sell old guitars, and old banjos, and old mandolins…. old is good…..sometimes even better! Maybe it’s a little self-serving, but I’d like to say a few things in defense of old people. At age 77, I am certainly qualified to know a little bit about aging. Despite several medical stumbles, I’ve been trying to do it as gracefully as possible. When I was younger, I spent a great deal of time with older folks, especially at my grandparent’s house. I "worked" in my grandfather’s bakery and engaged in conversations that I could only half understand. I knew my great-grandparents, Cologero and Catalda Ippolito and the dialogs I listened to were endless….often veering off into Sicilian dialect. It was the "stuff" than filled my youth….the stories of "the Old Country". 

       As a teacher I always encouraged students to engage with old folks because they have just been around so long. They have lived through great deal of history. My youngest daughter, Grace told me she was going to watch a football game at her friend’s grandfather’s house. He is 88 years old and a diehard football fan. She said it would most likely be really boring but I gave her a bit of advice. Always take advantage of any opportunity to speak with someone who is an advanced age. It gives you a chance to interact with history from a living perspective, rather than reading someone else’s accounting of events…. If you want to find out what really life was like 60, 70 or even 80 years ago, converse with the people who lived through those times. These are called "first hand sources", and while they are not always the most accurate, they are certainly the most personal and interesting accounts of what life was like in the past. 

              In 1983 my first wife passed away and I was left with two kids, a dog, a parakeet and not much of a plan for the future. I was still  teaching and the small business that I had on the side continued to grow. I bought a house that would accommodate both my business and my family and life seemed to calm down for me. But, in the spring of 1985, for no reason at all, I happened to open the "help wanted" section of the newspaper. An advertisement popped out which read: "TEACH IN EUROPE tax-free! Apply today!" So I applied for the job and was hired on the spot. I called my girlfriend, Julie and asked her if she would like go on a long "date" with me. We moved our collective family to the Netherlands. When I arrived, I had an intake interview with the superintendent. He asked me how things were and if the kids were settling in well. I told him everything was great. In fact, I brought my girlfriend and her three year-old son. He looked at me incredulously and said you can’t do that. This is Europe! There are rules!  You have to have a visa to stay here. You have to have insurance. It’s absolutely against the rule. She’s going to have to go back. I told him that Julie’s uncle was George Hoffmeier who worked with him for 20 years and is the superintendent in the  American School in Germany. He looked at me and said, oh shit, I have to get her a job blowing a whistle on the playground.

    This was my first real taste of overseas travel, and even though we only stayed there for a year, we took great trips on every school vacation going to Italy, Germany, England, Ireland, Belgium, and Switzerland. After we returned I kept going back year after year, sometimes with Julie, sometimes by myself. The music business had grown so much that I eventually left teaching and the two of us worked from the basement of our house selling old guitars, banjos , mandolins and ukuleles around the world. Quite often I would be carting guitars and banjos across the Atlantic and saving the freight charges for my European customers.

    After September 11th, I didn’t seem to want to travel anymore. We now had two more children (making a total of five). The mail order business that I started grew exponentially. In 1996 we moved into and undertook the restoration of a very big mansion on East Avenue in Rochester. It was an incredible house of almost 7000 ft.² ….but it had been turned into five apartments and we converted back to a single-family home. We stripped woodwork, we sanded floors, we took down ugly old wallpaper, we remodeled the kitchen and we made it an incredible home for our family and our business thrived in the basement. Unfortunately, I kind of grew into it. I blew up to a hefty 300 pounds although I was healthy as a horse, I was beginning to look like a Clydesdale. Julie and I opened up a retail location for our business in 2006. It was located just down j the street from our house, close to the world famous Eastman School of Music. We called it Bernunzio Uptown Music.

     After living in the "mansion" for 20 years, the kids had all grown up and moved on. We sold it, paid off our debts, and after a few moves to apartments and duplexes, we eventually found our way to a beautiful Victorian home in the village of Penn Yan, New York where we now reside . This is  a small town in the Finger Lakes region of central New York State, which is mostly rural, agricultural land, Mennonites and wealthy lakeside residences. But the travel bug never left me. I  started to lose weight and monitor my diet and swim on a daily basis because I was crumbling from arthritis caused by sports injuries and a violent motorcycle crash when I was 20 years old. Even though I lost 100 pounds, I still ended up needing back surgery and knee surgery and with an all-around arthritic body that doesn’t function well as a walker, so I am now labeled as a "handicapped person". I’ve even got a sticker for my car to prove it!  

      While we’re on the topic of aging I have a few things to say. I have dealt with several health issues over the years. They are mostly mechanical issues, knees, joints, back…stenosis, arthritis, spondyloysis…all which cause tremendous, but intermittent pain. I have had great medical service over the past years, but mostly they’ve been chopping and cutting and replacing and trying to fix. They’re an honest medical team, but I’m ready to move on. Rather than approach aging from a medical standpoint, I’d rather look at it from a philosopher’s lens. So I have added a new mantra…"This is as good as it gets." Instead of trying to "get better", I have decided to just move forward because there is no "getting better"….I’m definitely not going to get younger, so it is with calm acceptance (and of course, Julie’s steady arm) that have helped me live through, and see past, my struggles. With this newest approach, I find a lightness in my step and an old excitement and anticipation of each day. I like this new life,  I’m ready to embrace it. As we age, everyone seems to handle things in a different way…. some of us become more reclusive. We hide out..we don’t want to show our age. We don’t want to show our disabilities. But why would you let your conflicts and disabilities determine who you will be, rather than your strengths and achievements. So,  be defined by what you can do not by what you cannot do.

      Now, at this point, I thought I could travel again, and I convinced Julie by purchasing two tickets to the Netherlands, specifically to the Hague, the city where we once lived. It was our anniversary, and we went away for two weeks. After three or four days of walking around in the Netherlands, I just couldn’t walk anymore. We wanted to go into a museum to view some of the great Dutch paintings, but I needed Julie to push me around in a wheelchair…. that had never happened before. I fell into kind of a depression and didn’t think I was going to be able to enjoy this trip of a lifetime. Luckily, a friend’s wife was a nurse, and she suggested I get a mobility device to ride around in. I had never considered such a thing  but  I could rent one for the remainder of the time we were going to be there. It was a life changer for me. I could go places all of a sudden; the world of travel had opened up once again to me, where I thought the doors were all closed. The mobility scooter offered me a new found freedom. Now the Netherlands is very handicap friendly. Most trams and trains have easy entry for mobility devices. And of course, the terrain is flat and level with no hills in sight. I will say this about the Netherlands and additionally about most places in Europe, including Sicily…. Whenever I was stuck, or there was a curb that was a little bit hard to mount or I was having difficulty getting on a train, someone would pop up from the crowd and help me. Helping strangers is a thing they do in Europe.

Immediately upon returning to the United States, I started investigating all the different types of mobility devices that were available. I settled upon a bright orange Optimus, which had a range of about 14 miles on a charge. At 55 pounds, it was light enough to be able to lift and put in the back of a car after it folded up with the press of a button. The Optimus was my newfound ticket to travel. Most importantly, Julie covered all the bases for the airlines to be alerted that I was going to have such a device and needed additional help. Truthfully, going through the airport is so much easier with the mobility device because you always get "scooted" to the front of the line and you can ride the scooter all the way up onto the airplane jet bridge and then take the battery out, fold it up, and hopefully get it back when you land.  One bit of caution, do not use a mobility scooter on the automatic walking devices found in the airport. I made that mistake and ended up doing a wheelie and almost lost everything. Stay off of them! 

     We planned a trip in 2019 to go to the Netherlands and then eventually to Sicily where I wanted to spend a good deal of time. Through Facebook we had connected with other Bernunzio’s who are from the same town as my father. We excited to be able to meet them, however, after landing in the Netherlands, Covid turned us back and the trip was postponed. Eventually in 2022, we returned to Sicily with the credit we had from the COVID canceled trip. It was then that I fell in love with the seaside town of Trapani, the  western most town in Sicily. It is a peninsula sticking out into the Mediterranean. It is the gateway to the Egadi Islands, the home of the Odyssey  and also is an important shipping and fishing port. It’s an old town that was heavily damaged during World War II. It has incredible churches, great food and kind people, but it’s not anything special EXCEPT it has a familiarity like the Netherlands…..everything is flat. Over the course of a several trips I’ve had a few accidents with the Optimus , and eventually I had to replace the it with the insurance money that we got from the airline after someone dropped it from a loading dock in Germany!

I now have a Solax Transformer. It is a sturdy ride with a few kinks. It is lightweight but with strong, metal parts, a comfortable seat, but it does not get the mileage that they said it would. As a result they gave me a second battery which I carry around. It folds up very neatly as you can see, but I use a cover and padding and bungee cords when I check it at the gate. I’m not particularly endorsing this model. I think they come out with new models every year and there are improvements and lighter weight and longer lasting batteries coming out all the time.This is the device that I took last December 27 on SOLO a trip from Rochester, NY, to Atlanta, GA, and onto the Netherlands, where I stayed with my friends, in the lovely town of Leiden, and then onto Sicily.

    I’ve always been a stubborn guy and I decided I was going to go to Sicily and live for an extended period of time. Julie could not travel with me because her parents are in their 90s and needed quite a bit of help. So I was on my own. I bought a one-way ticket and flew to the tiny town of Trapani on the western edge of Sicily. Since I had been there a few times before so I knew the lay of land. The main ingredient was that it was all flat without any hills. (Unfortunately, the flight from Amsterdam to Trapani was canceled due to the weather, and I was put up in a hotel. While I was at the bar, I met three young Sicilian guys, and we started talking because they saw a musical logo on my suitcase, and I told them I owned a music store, and they were musicians. I gave them my business card. They were from a small town in Sicily by the name of Alcamo. The next day, we took the flight and went our separate ways.

      Now I had traveled to Sicily many times and had covered most of the island, including the area where my father was from, which was the center of the most part of the island. There it is very mountainous, and the buildings and roads are made of cobblestone. That makes for an  extremely uncomfortable and a difficult ride using a mobility device . So I picked a destination that suited me. Trapani is an old town and is a peninsula, so it has the sea on both sides and has something that is very similar to the Netherlands….it  is completely FLAT! In fact, they have windmills that were imported from the Netherlands in the 1700s.  They are used to evaporate the water for harvesting salt from the sea. They’ve done it for 3000 years since the time of the Carthaginians.  So it is an absolutely flat terrain, no hills, few bumps, but basically easy to get around on a scooter. In fact, I was able to go around the entire peninsula in a matter of two hours.

      One thing I’d like to stress is that I was not on a vacation… it was a pilgrimage. If you want to just be entertained, go on a cruise or take a packaged tour and you’ll come back with some nice memories and pictures …. A pilgrimage is something different. The memories are life-changing. It’s not entertainment that you are seeking, it’s experience. You have to be prepared….  you have to be ready for every type of situation and everything under the sun. But, first of all….. why would I ever want to travel alone and what kind of things do you have to look for when you’re traveling alone? In October of last year I had my 77th birthday. Now that’s old by my family standards. None of the men ever lived past 80 except uncle Vinny, God rest his soul. He lived to be 83. I don’t know why… he was 5’5" and weighed nearly 400 pounds. My father used to remark Vinny, not for nothing but my your zipper is longer than my belt. In fact , they used Vinny‘s belt to measure the distance when they were playing the game of bocce. So I guess there’s a bit of doom is in my blood. How long am I going to last and how will I use the time that I have left?  Now, I don’t know if it was politically motivated perhaps because of the turmoil after the election but somewhere around November, I pleaded with Julie to buy me a one-way ticket to Europe. I told her I wanted to go to the Netherlands and spend a few days with our friends and then I was going to go by myself to the city of Trapani where we had stayed a couple of other times. Of course I picked Trapani because it is flat and easy to negotiate and I knew my way around and I picked an apartment where we had stayed once before because it was easily accessible with an elevator and a small gym in it so I could keep on my routine. And it was in a neighborhood that I was familiar with and that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to live in a neighborhood and traverse the area with just being a regular person albeit handicapped. I did not want to be defined by what I cannot do, but rather what I can do.

       When I was in Sicily there were times I did not speak to any except myself for several days, but through Facebook I communicated with friend and family and that really made a difference in my journey. This was not an easy trip for an handicapped person. I negotiated planes, trains and taxis by myself. I cooked, shopped and entertained myself. I just wanted to do it…I wanted to prove something…and what I have proven is that I am a tough, gnarly old bird. That is my new catchphrase …. whenever I came across a difficult curb to mount my scooter over, or a hill that looked a treacherous…. I would say to myself, "you can do this…because you’re a gnarly old bird! You’re tough and you’re not gonna let anything stop you".  Do not falling to negativity/ be aware of your surroundings at all times…. that's important.  Additionally, the cardinal rule is don’t fall down and you don't poop your pants…. if you do, they’re gonna put you in a place that you might not want to be.

   This was my adventure living alone as a "tough old bird" in the town of Trapani.

       I made friends and discovered a whole new way of approaching my disability. Making yourself completely familiar with the place you’re going to travel is an essential ingredient for a traveling solo. You have to have all the bases covered and as few surprises as possible. So my daily routine in Sicily consisted of a morning workout in the gym nothing too strenuous a bit of stationary bicycling and some light weights just to keep me limber, then a shower and a bit of a breakfast and then out shopping with my scooter and little folding bag.  After shopping I would head straight for the Villa Margarita which is a large park that was formed around 1890. It is a public area with palm trees, murky ponds, empty bird cages, some old ruins and a lot of old guys. I’d sit on a park bench and take in the sun and just be one of the old guys doing everything like them… except smoking a cigarette. Occasionally, we try to engage in a bit of conversation, but my command of Italian is very limited, so we would smile and pass each other on a daily basis and nod the old way.  The park is lit up in the evening with restaurants and bars surrounding it. I saw four guys at around 11 o’clock walking arm and arm and they were all smoking cigarettes. They were all in their 70s and they were obviously friends since they were in grade school. They were walking up the street and I followed them for a bit and one by one they would be dropped off at their house…. and they would kiss each other goodbye!

     I spent six weeks pretty much by myself…. the month of January and two weeks into February. After the first three weeks, I have to admit I was getting lonely. I had made a few friends, but I don’t speak any Italian and can’t really get that involved with other people. I was able to shop, order food, smile….but that was about it. I did a lot of reading and a lot of photographing and writing about my experience, but the human contact was missing. It was late one night that I was lying in bed kind of moaning to myself in my loneliness, and my phone made a little ping. it was a text from the guys I met on the plane the text read:  "Hey you seemed like a fun old guy. Do you wanna hang out with us?" It was the young men I had met on the trip on the way over from Amsterdam. They lived about an hour away, but they wanted to come and pick me up and show me around the three of them and one of their girlfriends took me to pizza joints, and restaurants and to their town of Alcamo, where there was a musical instrument museum.

    Sometimes things just happen serendipitously. It’s the way of life. Just as I was fighting the struggle and downward spiral of loneliness and missing my family and any human connection, I got that electronic message. Mauro, Antonio, Mario and Monica picked me up from my apartment in Trapani and took me to their town of Alcamo. They had an entire event planned for the evening. First they took me to a cannoli place, but it wasn’t open yet. We were hanging around and they told me they just wanted me to try a cannoli because I probably never had one. But, I had to admit that I grew up around cannolis and I already had my one cannoli per year limit! So we left the cannolis. Then, "master of the road", Alberto, drove around and we saw some majestic views. Then, we went to the center of Alcamo where explored their town. Then they took me to an antique musical instrument museum with a lovely collection! It had all been donated by a local patron. The museum, of course, was set up at an old church and had instruments from every continent. It was really quite interesting. 

      Antonio and Mario are aspiring musicians, Monica works in jewelry and Mauro is studying to be an attorney with his site set on international law. They are all in their early 20s. They are well spoken, educated and committed young people, but as young people, they are searching for what the world is going to become. We exchanged quite a few candid political conversations and ideas and I get a feeling there’s quite a cloud hanging over their heads. Europe is always sensitive to anything that happens in America. As I followed them around on, Rocinante (as my mobility scooter, has been named….after Don Quixote’s horse), I had only this advice for them."Do what your passion tells you, it is the only ticket to true happiness". We ended the evening with a fantastic meal in Castellammare del Golfo and we promised to get together before I left Trapani. 

    We got together several times over the next few weeks and guess what? They are all coming to my house for Thanksgiving. They’ve never been in the United States. They didn’t even have passports or a visa, but they’ve got all their materials they’re going to land in New York City spend three or four days there and then drive up to Rochester, New York to see my store and play some music. Morrow asked me if we would be able to go to Niagara Falls. I said certainly it’s not that far we could make a day event of it but why do you wanna go to Niagara Falls. He told me that his grandparents were living in New Jersey when they got married, and they spent their honeymoon in Niagara Falls. Eventually they moved back to Sicily. I said oh how sweet are your grandparents still with us and he looked at me and said, "well of course, they’re in their 60s!".

So wrapping it all up, I just want to give you a little story from a few years back.  I was scootering around the streets Rochester during our annual Jazz Festival when I had an incident that brought out all kinds of "old man” anger against the system. I thought I’d take a little drive around the downtown area on my scooter. No sooner did I get out on the street, when a panhandler came up to me and asked me for $10 dollars (inflation!). I’ve always been good to panhandlers, but I at that moment I just had a chip on my shoulder. I looked him in the eye and said "hey, I’m disabled…you can’t panhandle me. There must be some kind of rules. There must be some kind of organization, even for people who panhandle. You just don’t panhandle handicap people..we are on the same team as you!". He paused, looked at me and said yeah you’re right!   

      Well, since then I’ve had a new attitude. "Make them all crazy!" Think…...Dustin Hoffman in the movie "Midnight Cowboy":  "I’m walkin’ here. I’m walkin’ here!…… get out of my way". Instead of being embarrassed about aging and disabilities…and all of the paraphernalia that comes with it….I say,  FLAUNT IT….Yeah run them over with your walker. Knock them out of the way with your cane. Run them down with your wheelchair!  Have a little pride. There are a lot of old folks with still with enough gumption to attack the world. I’m on their side. We will not be defined by our disabilities, but we are defined by what our contribution has been to the greater good…and most old folks that I know have paid their dues. So watch out world we’re coming on strong. We’re tough. We’re coming with walkers. We’re coming with mobility scooters. We’re coming with all sorts of canes and sticks. We’re are gnarly old birds and we’re going to take back our world.

    As a final note, Julie and I are leaving at the end of December for Trapani. She has agreed to stay with me for a couple of weeks to get me settled. I’m going back to the same place with the same friends and the same agenda. One way ticket! Get ready here I come!

With peace,

John Bernunzio