Day 160: A Windy — and Whiney! — Day Trip to Bonifacio
Joanna and Dave were up and out super early. They were headed back to Boston for Buffy’s 20th HS reunion. We miss them already!
We did school again in the morning for our 5th out of 6 days here in Corsica. Willa had a mini-meltdown about half way through her school (seems to be a semi regular thing driven by frustration after meeting some minor challenge). She headed to her room and took a short nap.
We scratched together a tuna sandwich lunch, doing our best to clean out the fridge on our last day.
We got in the car and made the 30 minute drive to Bonifacio — a little cliff side town on the southern tip of Corsica whose pictures grace the covers of every guide book for this island.
It was very warm at our house today so we didn’t pack sweaters or jackets for the kids. Turns out it was ridiculously windy up on the cliffs of Bonifacio.
James said he was cold from the second we got out of the car and proceeded to whine and complain about everything possible for the next 90 minutes straight. Ugh.
Willa was actually totally fine. She wanted to duck into the little shops, looking to score some jewelry.
The moaning about “touring” has become a shtick. We even mention checking out a town (let alone a tour with a guide doing grownup talk) and they start bitching.
I say to them, “You’ve had two weeks of nonstop bliss with cousins / friends in pools, gardens and playgrounds and you can’t let mommy and daddy do two hours of something we want to do??”
Of course that doesn’t work with a 7 and 5 year old. The key is that we have to find a way to make these little parts of our trip interesting for them. Or just resort to bribes for good behavior!
We tried to get cash at an ATM on the way into the town but it didn’t seem to be working. Oh well.
Then we stopped and got a coffees and fresh OJs at this cool little cafe, not realizing until after we had downed our drinks that it was cash only. And that broken ATM was the only one in town. Oh shit.
I went back to the ATM and thankfully it had been fixed since we had first walked. So I got the Euros we needed and ran back to pay our bill.
We wandered around a bit more and then decided we couldn’t take the whining and the Cape Town-esque winds so we headed back to the house.
There we took a swim, cleaned up, packed up, made adult snacks and kid dinner, then put the kids to bed.
Margaret made a salad and heated up a couple quiche Lorraines and we had our final dinner outside at this lovely little house on this special island.
In the morning we’re off to Vence (outside of Nice) for the weekend.
Another note about tourism:
During the drive to Bonifacio Margaret read a couple articles out loud to give us a little background on the place. One piece from 2018 referred to it as a relatively “undiscovered” part of the Mediterranean.
Yet when we arrived we found this quaint little cliff side town swarming with tourists. In June. Several weeks before the high season.
We’re certainly not the first to write about overtourism. And, needless to say, we are tourists so we’re contributing to the issue.
But we are wondering if during this trip around the world we are witnessing the end of “undiscovered.”
