Back

Goodbye Sicily | Day 62 of my 2023 Journal

Cecilie Conrad·Mar 3, 2023· 3 minutes

We arrived in Sicily in mid-December. Now we are leaving. Sitting on one of the beaches, watching my seventeen-year-old son walking along the coast, I am touched by what Sicily did to us.

It feels like we found a new home. One more.

Our new friends and hosts at Villa Nina shared with us a saying from this Island. “Sicily makes you cry twice: Once when you arrive, and once when you leave.” I get it.

The beauty here makes you cry. The welcoming people. All of the blue colors of the sky and the ocean. The special light of the sunset. The produce. The mix of cultures, the layers of history.

It is with heavy hearts we will cross the Strait of Messina today. Yet, I am sure when we set foot on the Italian boot, little butterflies will wake up in our stomachs as new horizons await.

We stayed six weeks in beautiful Vila Nina in the southeast and another five weeks of driving around the whole island. Still, there is a lot to come back to. We never visited Erice or Taromna; we were barely inland and did not explore the volcano. We did not visit any of the surrounding islands.

It is wonderful to know there is a lot to come back to, and it is lovely to have fallen in love with a new place on the planet.

This Is the insight of today. Goodbyes are not sad. They are always Au Revoir, “See you again.” Goodbye means I love you, and I will take you with me in my heart. Thank you for this time, thank you for you. It means to trust in the process of life. It means new adventures await. It means this is good, and other options are good as well. 



We say goodbye all the time, and it does not leave us sad. We feel the love, not the deprivation. We feel grateful, not sad. We acknowledge that: “Time is a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff” - therefore, so is goodbye.

We are here now, always, and forever.

Under the stars.

In time.

And space.

Love and light

Cecilie-Underskrift-300x133

Cecilie Conrad


Thank you for reading

I would love to hear from you. Listen to your thoughts and reflections - or praise :) It is often emotional to share our lives like this, and we get very happy when we get feedback from you. So feel free to share a comment below 😋 

See more images on Facebook

What does it mean to be happy? Often, we don’t stop to understand it while it is ongoing; we trot along and live, only to realize how much we had the…Read more
Two hours of planning and negotiations of who was coming and who was not finally got us out walking. Not far, and not all of us, as some are down wit…Read more
Life is this. The moving around. The people we move for. Reaching out to the opportunities, taking what is, and appreciating all the big and little g…Read more
I scored eight out of ten on the travel score sheet of my son-in-law, as I had brought a knife in the packed lunch - the knife took my two last point…Read more
Goodbye, Mexico City. That was fun! And exhausting. We want to come back, but we are also eager to leave. It is intense to visit the huge cities. Read more
The central story of this day is the earthquake. Thank God we have no pictures. Because there was nothing to take photos of. Except for a lot of peop…Read more
It is nice to sometimes just have a practical day. We needed papers to travel with the dogs, so Silke and I walked to the local vet; smiling, profess…Read more
The classic pilgrimage to the main art museum, the cathedral, the central square, and the Aztec ruins took us through a rich array of experiences. Th…Read more
I just wanted to include more images from the same day. The streets with their shiny buildings contrasting the little cargo-bike-food stalls, the arc…Read more