Cliff note’s version: Lido San Lorenzo = awesome (and spendy). They deliver food and drinks to your chair!

Long version:

My friend Annie and I loaded up the kids Tuesday for a trip to a beach she’d visited before, Lido San Lorenzo. It is located near Noto (a town we visited last November), south of a nature preserve called Riserva Naturale Orientata Oasi Faunistica di Vendicari (long enough title, eh?). It was about an hour and 20 minutes or so to get there, so a bit longer than our usual spots Cassibile and Fontane Bianche.

So, my first impression of this beach was FANCY.

We only went for the beach, but I guess there is a spa as well? Plus a bunch of other activities, according to their website. There is a restaurant, a pizzeria and a self-service type tavola calda situation as well. Annie luckily knew to call ahead a reserve chairs from the first time she visited, so she did that early in the week (if you are planning to go, she said there was one front desk person who spoke English). I believe our two sunbeds + umbrella cost 30 euro for the day, plus another 6 euro for the kids’ admission.

We could have rented a big bed like this, but it would have been 60 euro. Even bigger ones (that fit four) were 100 euro, though prices are different at different time of the summer (August is peak).

The water here was as beautiful as Cassibile, but with chairs and amenities like Fontane Bianche (but better). Once you get there, you can download their app and use it to order drinks and (after 12:30/1) food that is delivered to your chair. Surprisingly promptly, I might add. We got a couple rounds of cocktails, plus pizzas that turned out to be both really tasty and a bargain at only 4 to 5 euro each.

The water was great and so was the aperol spritz, so it should come as no surprise that we ended up staying most of the day. Owen and I never wanted to leave the water!

I would definitely suggest this as a good splurge sometime. The extra 20 to 30 minutes compared to Cassibile isn’t the best (and obviously it is a bit more expensive than other beaches) but if you are making a whole day of it those aren’t a big deal. It felt seriously luxurious to just be able to summon drinks and food to our table with the press of a button (ok, Annie had that app so I wasn’t even doing the pressing, ha!). And almost relaxing? Like, as close to relaxing as you can get when on a beach with two little kids. Splurge. Worthy.

I also wanted to give a quick shout out to our new favorite pool destination — sorry, Alphio’s! We are loving the Hotel Sigonella Inn in Motta Sant’Anastasia! I’d actually read about this place on another blog from 2011 before we’d gotten here, but once I arrived I’d heard that it had been shut down or that it was open but sketchy. After some friends tried it out and said it was great, we decided to go ourselves. Sig Inn, where have you been all our lives?! Only complaint is that getting a spot there was a pain the last time, though I attribute that mostly to it being August and a lot of people here are off for most of the month. Anyway, it is 3 euro per seat but if they don’t have chairs you can put your stuff on the deck for free. One warning: the deck is insanely slippery. All three of us have hit the deck at least once.

It has a great baby pool that sort of overhangs the main pool, which is pretty cool looking. It is only a couple feet deep in there, but quite a large space so pretty perfect for when we go with friends and want the crew contained so we can chat for more than 30 seconds.

People jump off this ledge into the pool, which makes me laugh because it feels like something you’d get yelled at for in the States. 

There is also a SWIM UP BAR (!) that I’m hoping to visit with friends next week once my kids are in school.

BUT, the thing my kids love most is this:

Diving board, baby! They were nervous the first day and wanted me to “catch them,” but now they are absolutely obsessed with jumping off it. Constantly.

Oh, don’t mind Fiona. Just doing something unexpected and TERRIFYING here, per usual. 

If you haven’t been, check it out! I’m hoping we have at least a few more weeks before they decide it is fall and close up shop.

The post Exploring our island: “Fancy beach” and our new favorite pool spot first appeared on Babies With Backpacks.

The post Exploring our island: “Fancy beach” and our new favorite pool spot appeared first on Babies With Backpacks.

So, as foreshadowed by this post our account of our weekend in the south begins with two more car-related incidents.

Incident One: Had to pull off in some grass because a truck approached on the not-one-way rural road we were on. While sitting there, Chris casually asked me how much longer until we hit Ragusa, which we couldn’t see yet.
Me: “Three minutes.”
Long pause. Long glance at the fields of cows and sheep around us.
Both of us: “Wait, what?”
Turns out the GPS was leading us to the middle of some random field, basically. Whoops. Easy fix, though.

This is where we realized we weren’t three minutes from Ragusa

Incident Two: We made it to Ragusa and were marveling at how little traffic was on the road. We were following our instructions and down a cobbled street that, again, one might have assumed was a one-way. Nope. The tiny Fiat in front of us squeezed past the bus, but it wasn’t even close for our Toyota. So we ended up backing up the better part of a block so that the bus could get past. This happens a lot though, so the cars behind us were obliging!

Anyway, it was a rainy morning in Ragusa but we still had a great time walking around, riding a tourist train and (mostly) eating. Most important of all was just admiring THIS VIEW:

We decided to park temporarily on a sidewalk (other cars were doing it!) to evaluate our options because the road looked like this:

For the record, we did end up driving this way to go home and it was totally fine.

Chris realized there were stairs into the center of town, so we decided to walk instead of driving. If anyone else is visiting, I highly recommend this. The walk was slightly perilous because the stairs were slippery from rain, but it was otherwise beautiful and not nearly as far as it looks in the pictures.

We just walked toward what we figured would be the center of town, and the next thing we knew we were coming up right next to the Duoma Sant’Giorgio, and the piazza next to it.

We stopped for some cappuccino in a shop right on the square to get our bearings (and because the kids are always better behaved when fed) and I went to investigate a small tourist train on the plaza. I assume the combination of it being the low season and rainy, but no one was out and the train driver agreed to take us whenever. We ended up being trend setters though, because a Rick Steves tour group turned up and ended up joining as well. We had a nice time talking to a couple from the Pacific Northwest, who we also ran into in Noto the next day.

When we ran into them in Noto, they announced they were apparently here just to take a picture of the four of us. So we ended up with two pictures of the four of us in two days, haha

The tourist train was pricey at 20 euro (I should probably have negotiated a free ride for the kids, since I didn’t specify when talking to the guy) but worth it because of the rain. We got a chance to ride around and see some of the sites and hear just a little bit of history along the way. I did wonder a tiny bit about some of the translation; for instance, it announced that people would go to the “Church of Purgatory” to be covered in honey so bees and other insects would sting them. Sounds a bit out there, but on the other hand … people did wear hair shirts and whip themselves, so who knows?

View from the train

Like many of the other cities we’ve been in, Ragusa was rebuilt in the Baroque style after the 1693 earthquake that destroyed so much of Sicily. It is one of eight towns that have been described by UNESCO World Heritage as “representing the culmination and final flowering of Baroque art in Europe.”

After the tour, we wandered and ate, mostly. We tried some kind of pastry that was basically fried elephant ears about the size of tennis balls (amazing) and some pistachio cream (vivid green and surprisingly delicious). We also ended up at an ice cream shop since I’d heard tell of Ragusa’s wine ice cream. (Really, it was all in the name of research.) It turned out this place had several flavors of wine ice cream, so I went with moscato. And dude — it did taste exactly like moscato. Not quite like regular ice cream, but not like a wine icee either. I had gotten it more for the novelty than with any expectation it would be any good, but it was actually really delicious. I did not see the olive oil ice cream, which is apparently also a thing, but I would have liked just a tiny sample. I really can’t imagine how that would taste?

We were staying in Modica, as I mentioned before, and it was an easy drive from there — maybe a half hour? We spent the morning and early afternoon there, then headed home in time for (we hoped) a nap before our 4:30 p.m. chocolate tour in Modica.

Day Three
We packed up our apartment Sunday morning and headed out to Noto, about an hour away. Noto has been dubbed “The Stone Garden” because of the sheer number of gorgeous churches, palaces and other buildings done in the Baroque style (yes, after the earthquake). We had a great time just wandering the streets and taking it all in (especially since it was a Sunday morning).

One of our first sights

I did decide to go up to the bell tower of one particular church (name escapes me, sorry) but only made it to the halfway point because it was making me dizzy. This is a terrible picture, but these tiny stairs included a rope for you to hold on since there wasn’t a handrail. I’m not sure how I would have handled it if someone had come down the stairs as I was going up, or vice-versa — I guess one of us would have had to reverse?

View from the spot I did make it to

This is the city’s most iconic building, the Noto Cathedral. On the inside, it was surprisingly white and light — very different from most of the European churches I’ve seen. It reminds me a little of the Sagreda Familia in Barcelona in that way, but obviously not a fraction as ornate as that place

That Rick Steves’ trip couple took this picture too!

On the steps of a palazzo across from the cathedral, waiting for me to climb down from the bell tower

We had a gorgeous lunch at Trattoria al Buco, which seemed to be a popular Sunday lunch spot for the after-church crowd, I’m guessing. We sat at a table outside just across from the Chiesa Santa Chaira and I had the tied-for-best ravioli with meat sauce I’ve ever had.

Chris playing with the kids at lunch

Mommy enjoying herself at lunch while he did this

We ended up finding a park to play in for a while, paused to watch the world’s largest cat baiting a tiny dog and stealing its food and wandered a bit longer before we decided it was time to call it a weekend. We had a great time!

The post Our weekend in Modica, Ragusa and Noto, continued first appeared on Babies With Backpacks.

The post Our weekend in Modica, Ragusa and Noto, continued appeared first on Babies With Backpacks.