I’m skipping a day and fast forwarding to our last full day in the Aeolian Islands. (lots of great photos from Day 5 to share!) Honestly, when we knew we were headed to Sicily, I started reading through as many guidebooks as I could get my hands on. These tiny little islands didn’t even make my radar. Each guidebook had like a line or two for each island but really not a lot of detail. I am so glad I did a little more research and we decided to spend nearly a week here.

One thing that is striking about these islands are all the active and dormant volcanos. Ok, I admit I don’t know how many or what their exact story is (trust me I will be finding out once I’m stateside and can do some research). But dormant to me means (yes, it’s been awhile since I took French) sleeping, not extinct, just sleeping. Then how on earth can I look out from our hotel balcony on Lipari and see the island of Vulcano and notice that there is a crater with smoke constantly coming out of it? And this is a volcano that you are free to climb to the top and peer into the crater. Yes, this sleeping but smoky volcano. Hence the name Vulcano I presume.

Well we took the ferry over to see what it was all about – just about a 10 minute ferry jaunt from Lipari. We had heard about the healing mud baths but once off the boat, the smell of sulphur was more than my little sommelier to be Gabby could handle. Isabella likened it to living in an egg salad sandwich. So needless to say we did not soak in these baths, but proceeded to pass by at a good clip.

Fresh air was just a few meters away – and so was the entrance for the huge climb to the top of the volcano. I was secretly hoping that there was a taxi service to the top, but since my Italian is pretty much non existent and no taxi presented itself then I have to assume climbing was the only option. Well the kids hadn’t had lunch, the sun was beating down on us, we had one tiny bottle of water and the girls were in birks. The deck of cards was stacked against them climbing to the top with a smile on their faces and if we still wanted to be together as a family after the hike I wasn’t in favor of dragging them up. (Or maybe it was me who would have been worse for wear climbing in these conditions, we will never know for sure!) But I know for certain that it would have ended badly.

So I took one for the team and brought the kids to lunch while Keith strode to the top and took these beautiful photos.