All we saw was the beach…no tourist information, no roads, nothing except 2 restaurants and 2 hotels. Mom plopped down with all our stuff on a lounge chair while dad and Jeanine went exploring along the beach to find someone who spoke English…we found one person. He told us we had to take the road behind the beach to get to path that goes up to the crater of the volcano. We made our way back to mom and decided to eat lunch at a pizzeria. So, we ate a really good “sandwich”-like stuffed pizza (not a calzone), sitting looking out at the black sand beach. During lunch we saw a man order a few pizza’s to go and he literally took them in the water with him and he swam to his boat holding the pizza’s above his head!!! Our waiter turned out to also speak English and he gave us better directions to the mud pools and to the crater. We walked to the mud pools and saw that they take bags and watch them (only if you go into the mud pool) so we paid for all of us to go in and told them we would be back in a little while (it turned out to be 2 hours later). We had brought a lot of stuff with us because we didn’t know all there was to do on the island. Once our bags were secured we walked around the mud pools (which smelled so bad it was very disgusting) and we found our way to the path up to the crater. The climb was literally straight up the mountain on volcanic gravel- Jeanine had on her sandals because she can hike in them, and didn’t realize it would be loose gravel. It wasn’t too bad going up. It only took us 40 minutes to get to the top (go us!) and we had a great view of Lipari and Vulcano. The volcano itself was very neat. It constantly let out steam from different places on the left side and there were yellow sulfur deposits on the rocks. Walking back down the volcano was harder, especially with sandals, but we made it! At the bottom we stopped for ice cream and water and a rest.