Day 113 – Planning Fatigue, Sicilian Pastries, and a Colourful Beach Afternoon

The kids are definitely starting to wake up earlier lately. Around 6:30 seems to be the new normal.

The sun rises earlier here in Sicily, and once it’s up the kids are up too. The good thing is they’ve been getting straight into their schoolwork. By the time Kia and I roll out of bed around 7, make our coffees and sit down with them, they’re already halfway through their work.

Our room has proper blackout blinds, so we can cheat a little bit and sleep in while the kids get started.

Today’s main goal was simple in theory but exhausting in reality: finish planning the next leg of the trip.

Planning while travelling sounds exciting, but honestly it can be incredibly draining. There are so many moving parts, especially when you’re trying to coordinate with other people.

Some friends of ours from Israel are currently trying to get out of the conflict happening there and are heading to Italy. We’re hoping to catch up with them somewhere in Puglia, so there’s been a lot of back-and-forth messages trying to figure out where our paths might cross.

Eventually, after a lot of searching, messaging, and changing plans, we finally locked something in.

The plan now looks like this:

• Fly from Sicily to Bari
• Spend two nights in Bari
• Catch a train to Lecce for two nights
• From there take a bus down to the coastline

That coastal stop is one I’m really looking forward to because I promised Emmett we’d try to find some cliff jumping spots, sea caves and swimming areas.

On the way back north we’re hoping to meet our Israeli friends somewhere near Alberobello and stay in one of the famous Trulli houses, those white stone huts with the pointed roofs that look like something out of a fairy tale.

So far we’ve booked:

• Bari accommodation
• Lecce accommodation
• The train between Bari and Lecce

Tomorrow we’ll book the rest once we hear back from our friends.

We also looked into the trains from Bari to Verona, and then from Verona to Lake Garda, which will take us to the next long stay of the trip.

After days of uncertainty it finally feels like we’ve cracked the puzzle, even if it took a lot of energy to get there.

At the same time, I spent a bit of time working on our website, updating some of the daily blogs and reviewing other travel blogs to see how they structure things.

One thing I keep coming back to is that I don’t want this site to turn into a “buy our itinerary” type travel blog.

There are a lot of those out there.

Instead, I’d much rather it become a resource that simply shows what’s possible. Something that says:

“This is how we did it. If we can do it, maybe you can too.”

More storytelling. Less selling.

Later in the afternoon we drove into Campofelice di Roccella to grab some water and a few groceries.

You’re not really meant to drink the tap water here, so we’ve been buying large bottles to keep at the house. Kia also needed water to bake bread, so she made a fresh loaf while we were home earlier in the day.

While we were in town, Kia and I grabbed a coffee and tried a couple of local Sicilian pastries.

They were twisted doughnuts with a hole in the middle, lightly fried and dusted with sugar. One was filled with sweet ricotta, the other with cream.

These pastries are known in Sicily as “Treccia Siciliana” or sometimes “Ciambella Siciliana”, and the ricotta filling is a classic flavour across the island. Ricotta is used in many Sicilian desserts, including cannoli and cassata, because of the region’s long history of sheep farming.

Personally, the ricotta one was the winner.

The cream version was good but very sweet. The ricotta filling had a slightly lighter, more balanced flavour that worked really well with the fried dough.

Simple, local, and very good.

Meanwhile the kids were outside doing what kids should do, climbing trees, running around and inventing games.

Recently we made the decision to pack the tablets away for a while and cut TV completely.

And honestly, it had been working really well.

The kids were playing outside more, exploring, building things, and generally being far more creative.

But yesterday it started raining, and we made the call to let them watch a bit of TV.

Lesson learned.

Almost immediately the behaviour shifted back into that “easy mode” mindset, arguing, complaining, not wanting to do anything else.

It’s amazing how quickly it flips.

So we’re going back to the original plan:

No TV and tablets staying packed away.

It just works better for everyone.

Once the rain cleared we took the kids down to the beach.

The light was incredible.

There were heavy clouds rolling through, but the sun kept breaking out between them, lighting up the water and the rocks in all these incredible colours.

We built a little rock fort near the shoreline, the kids played around exploring, and Kia and I sat nearby chatting while watching them.

It was one of those slow afternoons where nothing special happens but everything feels good.

Eventually we headed back to the accommodation around 6pm.

Kia and I weren’t particularly hungry because we’d had a pretty big lunch earlier, so the kids ate some leftover dinner from the night before.

Then we pulled out Uno Flip, which turned into a surprisingly long game.

There was a lot of laughing, a lot of chatting, and plenty of chaos as the cards kept reversing the direction of play.

By about 7:30 or 8pm we were all in bed.

Tomorrow is our last full day in Sicily, so we’ll try to squeeze in one more adventure before flying to Bari.