Italy: Sardinia (Part II)

Phew…that was a long story of our first morning on the island. Back to my scheduled post.

So it’s images like this one that inspired me to go to Sardinia. I expected bright blue skies, water, beautiful mountains…and we got all of that PLUS…hundreds of people added to it.

Right after Robert came home from his infamous “don’t be so stubborn next time” hike, we drove over to the beach that he found. As we were walking down the beach winding our way between chairs and umbrellas, I must admit I felt disappointed…the beach looked nothing like a peaceful paradise at all.

It was crowded. We spent maybe an hour on that beach, and as it got too hot, went back to our house, ate lunch and made a plan for the rest of our stay there. The plan was to explore different beaches within 10-15 min drive, most of them were South of us. So later that afternoon we went to a new beach called La Cinta. It is the best known and most popular beach in San Teodoro (biggest town several minutes from our house) with 3.5 km of white sandy beaches.

As we were walking down the boardwalk to find our place in the sun, we overheard a family at the ice cream stand speaking English. Katya tugged on my beach bag and whispered, “They sound American!”. A moment later, the couple struck conversation with us (as we were deciding which way to go) and said we could join them and have the kids play together. This family turned out to be from Canada, vacationing with their grandma who is Italian. They have three kids—two boys and a girl, roughly the same ages as our kids. So it worked out very nicely. It’s funny, because the reason that this couple said they thought we might be from somewhere other than Europe is because of how covered our kids were in sunblock and wearing swim shirts-haha.

This beach was a fabulous beach with perfect depth for little kids.

Katya playing with her new found friend.

At around 6 pm, we finally headed home, showered, changed and were back in San Teodoro’s town centre by 8.

We knew we were having a late dinner…We ate at a restaurant called Il Maggiotutto. Here is my after-beach look for you, waiting for my food.

Alex had to order tiny octopuses, of course.

This was Mark’s mussels. The kid is crazy—he wants to order mussels wherever we travel.

And a traditional Italian gelato for dessert. I actually agree-ice cream here is fabulous!

The next morning we decided to go to a rocky beach not very far from our house. It was called Cala Ginepro.

 

It was a very picturesque spot with only a couple other people sunbathing. In fact, it was so quiet there that we told our kids that this was a “quiet beach” so they could not speak loudly.

Do you see that island nearby on the picture below? That’s where Robert took the kids to explore—the sea bottom was very rocky, but the kids still loved it (except Alex who got hurt).

This was the morning I spent watching Robert and the kids play while reading my book (actually I spent a lot of hours doing that on this vacation).

In the afternoon, we checked out beach Lu Impostu. It was a nice little beach, but we still liked La Cinta better.

On the following day we went to hang out at another new sandy beach—Isuledda (I kept thinking of David Archuleta). It became one of our favorites as well. Although not as long as La Cinta it had really nice water.

Here is our beach tent from Coleman—only $35 or something on amazon, but worked great for our days in the heat. It fit into our suitcase and was easy to set up.

I think this was the day when the water was actually warmer than air. Fabulous!

Look at these fun colors! Love it!

The following day was Sunday. It was a nice day to take a rest from the beach for a part of the day. We drove up to Olbia to attend church at a small branch. Two American missionaries were so excited to see us, hoping we were moving into the area. 

Since we were already quite north on the island, we decided to drive up even further up to Porto Rotondo, a nice town that apparently falls asleep each afternoon between 2 and 5 (we forgot that part).

As we walked and walked searching for a place to eat, the kids’ exhaustion really got to them. Katya’s expression says it all.

We ate at a random café that was open at 3pm, but all they had were basic grilled cheese and ham sandwiches. Blah…but that’s all we had.

Well, and of course, some more gelato. Gelato places are open all the time, it seems-haha.

Robert had too much sugar, that’s for sure.

In the later part of the day, we got together with the Canadians at their villa near Isuledda beach and had a great time eating pizza together. They had a pool too;).

I won’t bore you with details of our beach going. There was a lot of sand, a lot of playing in the water, lots of sunblock application and a ton of windy drives back to our house.

We also snapped a picture from the roof of the house where we were staying.  You can sort of see where the sea is (that is not the nearest beach though).

One of the things we wanted to try while in Sardinia was to have a meal at one of the Agriturismo places. It’s a place where you eat a dinner with a whole bunch of other people at the same time but not in a restaurant setting—the menu is set and we are all served at the same time, just like guests would be at your house.

So after my quick search on Tripadvisor using our phone (we had no internet otherwise and that was PAINful!). We drove to a town of Padru, about 10 km from San Teodoro. We arrived at the Casteddu Agriturismo at around 7 pm, but the lady said that they don’t START dinner until 8:30 pm. It was fortunate that we never really adjusted to Italian time zone and kept living an hour behind according to the UK time.

To waste some time we drove to the central part of this tiny town of Padru and started following the signs for fonto Sos Setilles.

 

It looked like some sort of waterfall, right? Anyway, the road leading the sight was a very mountainous, windy, but beautiful road. We kept going up and up, stopping to take some wonderful evening pictures.

This is what happens when you tell kids to make silly faces and have the camera take quick twenty pictures of them.

Oh, here they are for real, threatened to not get any dinner if they don’t stand still.

Up on the top of the mountain we finally arrived at our destination. Not a waterfall….not a beautiful fountain…we are still not sure what in the world it was, and google search brings no clear results. It was basically a faucet of some sort, I am sure with a very special meaning. But it was not even dripping water.

Anyway, we were quite hungry by then, so we drove to our dinner destination, ready to eat some yummy Italian food. And wow…what a variety of dishes we got to taste! Lots of prosciutto, lima beans, zucchinis, tomatoes.

Some yummy baked cheese dish,

…and gnocchi (I think of you, Rachel, when I see gnocchi).

Basically, our meal was done in courses with quite a bit of spare time in between. The kids could run around the yard, play with the ball, play with the dogs or whatever. There was a lot of relaxing and waiting involved, but we did not mind.

Robert was ready for his main course though and it was not coming. He decided to attack the camera-girl instead.

More waiting and yawning. It was already after 9:30pm, and still warm.

Don’t they look alike? 

Oh yes, and back to food—yummy pork (suckling pig) and potatoes! So, so good!

And finally Sa Piola—honey and cheese Italian dessert. I am pretty sure we all had seconds, it was very good.

This never-ever happens, so I had to take a picture. They were exhausted after a very long day.

On our last full day in Sardinia, we made sure we spent an enormous amount of time at the beach. We brought some fresh bread, meat, cheese and fruit to the beach for lunch (that was our lunch all week long, pretty much…), so we did not even have to go home to eat.

I had to lead Alex away from his “Catastrophes” book a couple of times. Who takes a natural disasters kind of book on a vacation? Alex!

Mark was in heaven.

Katya and I took a very long walk down the beach and I ended up having my legs sunburnt.

Here is Alex reading again.

 

And here you have it—my quick recap of our fun sunny vacation. I am not sure we’ll ever go back to Sardinia—this was our once in a lifetime kind of trip. I am sure I will be looking through these pictures many times during these long winter months coming our way…maybe I’ll get inspired to plan another beach vacation for next year.