Month: April 2023

Todays post is going to be short and sweet. I got up at 5 am to watch the Timbers play Vancouver on Apple TV which is supposed to work anywhere in the world. After an hour of trying and failing including chatting with their help line, it did not work. I gave up and went back to sleep. After watching the “highlights” it looks like they did me a favor.

The rest of the day was spent chatting with our German and Dutch neighbors about travels. Our Dutch neighbors have been to quite a few adventurous/dangerous places so it was an interesting afternoon. We finished the day with a quick shop in Lidl.

We are starting to recover from jet lag. I woke at a pretty normal time, Ton slept in a little later but that may have been more because we didn’t plan on doing anything than jet lag.

After a while we decided to walk down the coast towards Marathon. Marathon is the site of a famous battle between the ancient Greeks and the Persians. A much smaller Greek army defeated the Persians by attacking both wings of the Persian army. In the military it is known as a double envelopment and the battle of Marathon is the first and most famous double envelopment, so it is still studied in many military academies. It is also the site of the beginning of the first Marathon. The legend is that a runner was dispatched to Athens to deliver the news of the victory, the runner ran the 26 miles to Athens as fast as he could, delivered the news and then collapsed and died.

The walk along the shore was nice as there is a promenade the whole way and frequent seafood restaurants if you wanted to take a break. The walk was a little further than we anticipated, but we enjoyed it.

Part way there we came across a small chapel right on the water. It had some interesting religious art that we enjoyed. All of the signs were in Greek so we are not sure what the story is behind the church but we had it to ourselves and enjoyed a little break.

By the time we got to Marathon port we had walked about 3 miles. Ton asked how far to the battlefield and when I told her 2 more miles, she said unless it is spectacular we should head back, I knew it wasn’t spectacular, a big field with a marsh on one side, so we headed back. We still got a 6 mile walk in which is pretty good exercise.

Today was another day battling jet lag. Ton and I were having a nice conversation at 2:30 in the morning, when we should have been sleeping. We both finally nodded off at about 3am, so the day did not get off to an early start.

Nea Makri campground is perfectly situated for Ton as there are three major grocery stores within 500 yards. Today we spent most of the afternoon visiting them.

One of the things we enjoyed about the Greeks last time was there comfort in trying to speak English or sign language to communicate with foreigners. Today in the My Market we took some vegetables up to be weighed. Vegetable sales are done quite differently in Europe depending on the country. In Greece you weigh them in the vegetable department and the scale prints out a bar code with the price. At the My Market they have a person there to weigh the vegetables for you and stick the price tags on. As we were getting our stuff weighed she tried to up sell us some strawberries and her English was basic and fun. Ton went back to get some oranges and she came back and asked the lady if they were sweet. She did not understand sweet, but really wanted to know what Ton was asking, so I googled sweet for her in Greek. She said no! and took Ton back to the oranges to get different ones. As we were standing there along with several Greek customers waiting to get there vegetables weighed while Ton picked the oranges, she looked at me and pointed to herself and said “I sweet”, and then pointed at me and said “You sweet”. Everyone around had a good laugh.

The campground has been pretty empty until today. We now have a three generation Israeli family next door, and I spent some time playing ping pong with a 10 year old Polish boy who spoke English really well. It is impressive how fluent the younger generations of Europeans are in English, and also very helpful for old Americans who don’t have any other languages.

The last thing was last November when we were here there were two cute white kittens who adopted us, because we were a good food source. We were happy to see that they are now fierce looking white cats and seem to be doing well.

We have learned that we need to build in a couple of recovery days at the beginning of our trips and we made good use of it today. We both tossed and turned throughout the night, we ended up sleeping in to almost noon. By the time we were up and about it was nearly 2pm.

Today is Tons birthday so we headed into the port for a seafood lunch/dinner. We ordered a large meal and were very happy with the quality and overwhelmed with the quantity. Ton decided we would hold onto the fried anchovies as she said it would go very well with the sticky rice.

On the way back we swung by a church we had seen driving in yesterday, but it was locked up so Ton took a couple of shots from the outside. By then we could see a thunderstorm headed our way, so we headed back to François before the storm hit and settled in for the night.

We spent last night in the Holiday Inn at the Athens Airport because we arrived too late to take care of the things we need to do when we first pick up François.

Over the winter we had stored François at Clio parking near the airport. If you ever need to store a vehicle in Athens we highly recommend Clio parking. They have provided us fantastic service including picking us up for free at the Holiday Inn this morning. This family run business has been wonderful and their prices are very good also. You can contact them at www.clioparking.gr.

Today consisted of running to two grocery stores, and unpacking and storing two big suitcases. While Ton was doing all of the hard work of unpacking I walked down to the nearest bank to get some Euros.

When I returned I tried the water and while I could hear water running we were not getting any at the tap. When I went outside there was a steady stream of water coming from an over flow valve under François. Fearing a broken water line I went to the campground office to see if they could recommend a RV repair place.

Surprisingly Athens only has a couple of repair places, and the nearest Knaus dealer is in Thessaloniki which is 500km’s from here. Our easy jet lag recovery weekend was looking in jeopardy. Stavros from the campground came down to take a look at the problem so he could explain it to the service center. Stavros started explaining the problem in Greek when the guy on the other end asked for me to be put on the phone. He explained to me in perfect English that our hot water system has an anti-frost feature that when it detects temperatures near freezing it automatically opens a valve in the hot water heater tank and dumps the water in it. This valve will remain open until you manually reset it. He then explained how to reset it, and recommended that next time we store the vehicle we open the valve and drain it to prevent it from happening again. I now have another item on the putting François in storage list. All my fears of long drives and rescheduling our ferry melted away and we are back on being lazy for the next couple of days while we recover from jet lag.

We are back in Greece. Happily we had no problems with any of our airlines, all of the flights took off and landed on time. The baggage arrived promptly and we were checked into the hotel by 6pm. A happy easy day of international flying.