Yesterday morning we were up at 6.30 all bright and shiny and ready to roll, looking forward to our first day of over 80k. We had just made it almost out of Siracusa, for once even riding up a hill and not pushing, when something went snap and the pedals would not move anymore. A quick check by the side of the road revealed: broken rear gearbox, no way to fix that by ourselves. Luckily we were not quite out of town yet.... On the unfortunate side, three bike shops kept playing pingpong with us: the first had neither tools nor spare parts, so they sent us on our way to the next one, who did have the tools but not the part. He then tried to make us buy the part at another shop to bring back to him, but that shops owner insisted on doing the repair himself....the whole thing required multiple trips back and forth as well as several hours of time, so that 1pm found us still in Siracusa, hungry and demotivated by the side of the road. After lunch, we gritted our teeth and decided to just try and go as far as we could - and lo and behold, just outside Siracusa starts a lovely, flat (!) cycle path (part of which was actually an old, unused motorway, which felt very strange but also fun)  which lets us get our speed up and makes us dare hope we can maybe still make it to our original destination. At one (downhill...) point, we even break our speed record: it now stands at 50kmh!
The good Fortune lasts until we enter Catania, which is a maze of one-way streets, cars and stray dogs. But even though the last 10k take us almost as long as the first 50, we do finally make it to our chosen campsite just before dark.