After spending a few days in Milan, I took a quick plane ride into Palermo to start the Sicily leg of my journey. I met up with my brother in the town near Palermo, having a chuckle that he decided to walk from the airport to the nearby beach instead of taking a bus or something. As we both came to learn, Sicily was very hot this time of year, despite it not even being the peak summer season yet!

In any case, I arrived at the airport mid-afternoon, and with my Avis Preferred benefits from work I was able to skip the queue and pick up a rental car for a steal of a deal. I swung by and picked JD up and we made the quick road trip down to Erice.

JD snagged this photo as we arrived in Erice, looking for the place we had booked. My roller bag didn't help much on these cobblestone streets!
In Erice, we met up with Kelly's immediate family (Cuda, Josef and Lilou), plus her friend Caitlyn. Erice was a charming little town with some great vistas.
This was the first time I'd seen rain gutters made from clay, which I thought was interesting!
The entire town had this general vibe of stonework, moss, and vines.
One of the cons of Europe travel is the jetlag, which normally doesn't throw me off too much. This trip, however, I struggled with it! The silver lining is that it meant I was up for the sunrise in Erice, which turned out to be absolutely spectacular.
The early bird gets the worm...or something like that, I guess?
While wandering the streets of Erice at 5 AM, an alley cat spotted me. He darted off to grab his friends, which ended up being at least four or five of them. They all peeked at me curiously from the distance, almost as if to say "dude, why are you up so early?"
One afternoon we loaded up into our cars and made the 30 minute drive from Erice to a nearby beach. We found this fun little cove which was crowded with a group of kids playing. Lilou had a good time swimming, and me and JD enjoyed a nice seafood lunch.
On the last night, JD, Caitlyn and myself went wandering around town enjoying the sunset. I snagged quite a few great photos, but this was my favorite.

And with that, the Erice portion of our trip was finished up. All in all, we were only there for a few nights which was plenty for me. It was a beautiful little town, and I'd recommend visiting. But it was very tiny, and I'd personally put this one in the category of day-trip destination, rather than an overnight one. Me and JD packed up the car with our small amount of belongings and began the road trip over to Agrigento, which was where the majority of our time was to be spent!

As a bonus, me and JD stopped in the port town of Sciacca. This ended up being a bizarre experience. The port economy has apparently collapsed in the past few decades, leaving what now felt like a largely abandoned city. Look closely and you'll notice half the boats in the harbor were left to rot and sink into the sea.
In addition to Sciacca, we met up with the family at a small little beach restaurant. It was clearly a popular resort destination, but it was still off-season in Sicily.