Author: Ron Corbin

There are good days and bad days when traveling. Today was a mix of both but mostly bad. The day began for me when at about 5am I woke up and suddenly decided to check our tickets to Crete. Something was bothering me and when I double checked I realized that I had been focusing on the arrival date which was today, the problem was the ferry was overnight and had left last night. To paraphrase the great philosopher John Wayne, “Travel is hard, but it is harder when you are stupid.” Feeling really stupid I fired off an email to the agent that had booked our ticket hoping for the best, but expecting the worst.

After exchanging several emails with the agent the worst came true, we were out the fare for the missed ferry. To make matters worst we would also be out the fare for the unused return tickets as they were non-refundable. So after looking at our options we decided to bite the bullet and buy tickets for tonight.

We spent the rest of the morning organizing ourselves for our first drive of the trip. I was not looking forward to driving to the port as it entailed crossing Athens. Our ferry did not depart until 10 pm but I wanted to get going in the early afternoon. Ton was worried that if we got there too early the port would turn us away. She had nothing to be worried about it turns out.

The drive across Athens turned out to be very smooth and we arrived at the port in about an hour. The only adventure came when the gate that our ferry was supposed to board from was closed and I did not realize it until we were sitting in front of it. I had to make a creative turn to get out and then wander thru a neighborhood for a few minutes before I found a gate that worked.

The port of Piraeus is the largest ferry port in Europe. Ferries to all of the different Greek islands run from there as well as sea going ferries to Italy and Turkey. It is really quite immense. What it is also is very loosely organized, bordering on chaotic. The first hint is there is no security to check you in at the gate, having worked in ports in the US in the past they are heavily guarded and entrance and movement inside is highly regulated, not so much here.

Once we were inside I saw a ticket kiosk for the company of our ferry and swung in there to see where I should go. The lady scanned my phone printed us out our boarding passes, one for Ton, François, and me and then told me that our ship would begin boarding in a few hours. I asked her where we should stage François and she said any where we wanted, just watch for the boat and get on when we see it.

After we found a comfortable spot we decided to head into town for dinner before boarding. Ton had read about this hole in the wall place near the port that had good food so we decided to check it out. The food was very good and the owner was a character. We ordered a beer to split with our dinner, but he came over and asked us how we liked the food and gave us another beer “on him”. A bunch of his friends came in and he joined them in a boisterous conversation punctuated with frequent toasts of a drink consisting of Vodka and Lemon soda. When I went to pay he grabbed me by the arm and with a wink pulled me out of Tons site and gave me a shot of the Vodka and Lemon soda to toast. But while we were having our illicit toast, his wife was telling Ton what we were up to and they were both laughing at us for thinking we could pull something over on them!

We returned to François and started looking for our ferry. After a while I noticed a bunch of vehicles lining up next to about where I though the boat was going to come in so I wandered over there and asked a Greek Coastguardsman if this was for Chania. He said yes and asked me where my car was, I pointed to François and he said bring it here and pointed to a spot in the do not park here area right next to the boat ramp.

When the ferry first arrived around 6:30 pm we figured we would have a lot of time to enjoy our “luxury room” before the scheduled 10 pm sailing. We were wrong.

The next 3.5 hours were spent with a front row seat on one of the most chaotic boarding operations I have seen. It began when we realized all of the semi-trucks we saw without trailers were there to go on board and haul unattached trailers off the boat. As the trucks were going on and off they would occasionally let 15 or 20 cars go on which turned in to a grand prix style race to be one of the privileged cars, while the crew and the coast guard tried in vain to maintain order. Occasionally someone would emerge from their car and get in a shouting match with the crew and the coastguard, that usually resulted in the irate person getting a head start on the other cars during the next boarding- car sprint. As this motorized chaos was going on the pedestrian passengers were intermingled with the vehicles and using the same ramp as the semi’s to get on board. It was really something else, and even though we were the first car in line the crew was adamant that we were not to get into the sprint to board, which just meant we were an obstacle that had to be negotiated during the sprint often with just millimeters to spare. Finally at 10:15 one of the crew pointed at us and told us to back onto the boat. It turns out that we were going to be the first vehicle off in the morning. As we were gathering our things, the Captain of the ferry came up to me and said that he really needed us here as soon as they docked as the ship couldn’t be off loaded without us moving first.

Our luxury cabin was really very nice, and we finally settled into it about 11pm with a short nights sleep to look forward to. To summarize anything to do with ferries bad, anything to do with Greece good.

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.

Today we took in the highlight of every tourists trip to Athens the Acropolis. There are historical sites, but besides the Pyramids and Machu Pichu none match the Acropolis in significance in my opinion. We woke up early, had our breakfast and were in the grounds by 8:30.

We were happy that we arrived early because the Acropolis was pretty quiet. The walk up the hill to the top is full of very interesting relics and sites of temples, but does not prepare you for the experience at the top of the hill where the actual Acropolis site is.

There are 4 ancient buildings standing today The Propylea which is the entry gate to the Acropolis, the Temple of Nike, the Erectheum, and of course the most famous building the Parthenon.

Once you are up there you cannot help to be awed by the history of this site. There have buildings here since around 500 AD, and some of the great figures of ancient history such as Socrates and Aristotle walked the same ground.

The two other temples at the site are also impressive and quite beautiful. We were particularly taken with the Erectheum and the six female figurines that hold up the Porch of the Maidens. Most ancient Greek buildings are symmetrical, but the Erectheum is not, besides the Porch of the Maidens there is another wing on the other wall of the building.

The building that is the center piece of the Acropolis is the Parthenon. It is strikingly large and impressive despite the damage that has occurred due to man made and natural causes. There is an extensive repair project going on to preserve the building hopefully for another 2500 years.

After a couple of hours on top of the Acropolis we noticed the crowds were building and decided to head to the museum to look at the collection of artifacts from the Acropolis.

The museum is massive and has an incredible display of different types of relics that have been recovered from excavations in the Acropolis. There was an interesting display showing statues that had been damaged when the Acropolis was pillaged by the Persians around 400 AD. Apparently a lot of the statues that had been wrecked were piled into a garbage heap and buried. They were discovered in the 1800’s and allowed modern archaeologists to learn more about that period of Athenian history. Five of the original maidens from the Erectheum were on display in the museum also.

Today is the Athens Marathon, which the Athenians like to point out is the original Marathon. As we were walking to the Acropolis, we saw a lot of people heading out to the marathon course in their running gear. As we were walking around the Acropolis we could hear the music and the hype guy at the marathon site the entire time. After we finished with the museum we decided to head over to the stadium to see the end of the marathon.

The finish was in the Olympic Stadium from the first modern Olympics which were held in 1896. The stadium is said to be the largest marble stadium in the world. When we got to the stadium the time since the start was 3 hours 15 minutes so the good non-professional runners were finishing and there was a steady stream of them.

We hung around for about an hour and it was fun to watch the reaction of the runners as they crossed the finish line. Finishing a marathon is quite an accomplishment and to be able to do it at the site of an Olympic Stadium must be extra special.

At this point we were getting hungry and decided to go for lunch. We didn’t have anywhere in particular in mind but thought we would find something that looked interesting and give it a shot. As we wandered thru Athens looking for the perfect interesting restaurant we found a couple that we thought about but always decided it wasn’t quite perfect. Finally we got into the section of town that was packed with post race crowds and suddenly nothing was close to perfect, so in the end we headed back to the hotel and had some snacks.

Yesterday we were a little disappointed in Athens, today she redeemed herself. We decided to spend one of our two days doing the Parthenon and Acropolis tour, and the other day exploring the city including the market and a couple of districts that are supposed to have interesting stores and restaurants. Since today is pretty grey and Sunday is supposed to be better we decided to do the city exploration today.

After breakfast we punched in the location of a spice store Ton wanted to visit and headed out on foot. Our route took us down the same wide boulevard as yesterday. Since it was Saturday it was a little less busy and loud than yesterday. After we passed by the turn to the Acropolis we found ourselves in a nice part of town full of interesting shops and tourist oriented stores. This area made a much nicer impression than yesterday.

Ton was in her element as there was an eclectic mix of specialized food stores, spice stores, bakeries, and cafes. I had to walk behind her so I wouldn’t lose her when something interesting got her attention. It took us about 2 hours to cover 1 km of shops before we arrived at Fotsi spice store.

The streets were busy but not overwhelming with Greeks slightly outnumbering the tourists. We also found the people watching interesting as there were an exceptional amount of very fit people walking around because of the Athens Marathon tomorrow.

The highlight of the day turned out to be the central market. These are always one of Tons favorite places, and the Athens market is one of the best ones we have visited. There were endless meat stalls with each stall specializing in a certain type of meat. The fish part of the market was also impressive. The market is not an architectural marvel or at all posh, it is a working market that local people come to for their meat, fish and vegetables.

Ton told me a fun story from her last trip to Athens. She was traveling with a Thai classmate when they went into a meat market and saw sheep heads on display along with the rest of the sheep. They were a little grossed out, until they remembered that in the markets in Thailand pigs were displayed exactly the same way as the Greeks displayed sheep, including the heads.

We ended the visit to the market with a great meal at a seafood restaurant, we ordered a fish soup and a small mixed plate of fish. We could not begin to finish our small mixed plate, and could only wonder what the large plate looked like.

Our last stop of the day was a tourist shop to get Ton a hoodie she had been thinking about all day. She rarely buys anything in these shops but we had stopped earlier in the day and after mulling it over decided to splurge. While we were in the shop three American women came in to buy a sweatshirt they were featuring for the Athens Marathon tomorrow that said “Finisher” on it. One of the American women was Greek-American and fluent in Greek. One of the other women asked if they could embroider “Finisher” in Greek on the sweatshirt. This started a conversation between the Greek-American and the two Greeks in the shop, it went on for a while and the Greek-American women finally confessed that the three of them could not come up with a direct translation of “Finisher” in Greek, the closest they could come up with in Greek was “I finished it”. The American friend said that was not quite the same thing, when her Greek-American friend pointed out to her that no one but her was going to be able to read it anyway so she could translate it any way she wanted. I enjoyed this lesson in linguistic nuance and couldn’t help but smile as Ton walked out with her sweatshirt that also said “Finisher” on it.

Today was our last day with François on this trip. We were both up early and did the final clean up and draining of all of the water on François on the off chance it freezes in Athens. We were ready to go about 9:30 so we decided to head out, Ton wouldn’t let me leave until she got out and made sure that all of our cat Pride were clear of François before I could move.

The trip over to the storage was quick and easy, and the folks running Clio storage were prepared to take us in. They ran us over to the taxi stand at a near by subway station and arranged a taxi to take us to our hotel in downtown. Driving to the hotel thru the center of Athens convinced me I made a good decision leaving François out by the airport.

After settling in at the hotel and having a light lunch we decided to head down towards the Acropolis for a quick recon of the sites before spending the next couple of days exploring the city in depth. Our initial impression was based on a very busy and loud 6 lane avenue we followed most of the way to the Parthenon area. It lacked charm and the building outside of the historical center were mostly 5 and 6 story concrete blocks that are totally uninspiring.

After poking around for a while and getting oriented on the sites we headed back to the hotel. The boulevard was even busier than earlier as it was now rush hour. We were even less charmed, Ton remarked that when she visited Athens in college she remembered it being a lot more intimate than now. She may have been more disappointed than me.

While tonight is not our last night on the trip, it is our last night in François so today was spent preparing to put him away for the winter. While Ton was packing our bags and cleaning up the interior I set off to try to find a car wash that could handle François. The manager of the campground told me that there was a car wash 2 or 3 km’s down the road, but he was not sure if it could handle François. I decided to walk down there to find out and they could not, but I did get my walk in for the day. François will have to go to storage a little dirty, but the storage site said they would wash him when we pick him up.

Nea Makri is located next to the town of Marathon which is famous for being the inspiration for marathon races. The story is that when the Persians were trying to invade Athens they landed at Marathon where the Greeks beat them in a major battle. A messenger was dispatched the 26 miles to Athens to tell the king that they had won, he ran the whole way at full speed to deliver his message and then collapsed and died. The Marathon of Marathon is scheduled to be run on Sunday and will use the road I walked down today but unfortunately we will be in Athens so will not be able to enjoy seeing the runners.

Today we were cleaning out the refrigerator so we had a little extra meat that we could feed to the campground cats. We have become quite popular and have an attentive pride of cats waiting outside François at all times now. Two cute white kittens have taken over the stool that we use to step on, and occasionally jump up on to François to see if Ton has prepared any more treats. If they weren’t so cute we would run them off as they are a little too persistent.

In the evening we took a walk down to the waterfront, and were surprised at how extensive it was and how many good looking restaurants there were. At the beach they had an interesting machine that is designed to allow a paraplegic or other wheel chair bound people to enter the ocean. It consists of a chair on a cable that goes down into the water to a pair of handles that allows the person to exit the chair and enter the water. This is the second one we saw, the first was at Missolonghi. It was designed and built by the engineering department at a Greek University and was very impressive.

Today is going to be a short entry. We are on the outskirts of Athens in a very “interesting” campground as it is made up of a lot of permanent residents. The manager seems like a nice guy and gave us a warm welcome once we tracked him down. We are at the point in the trip where we are preparing François for storage, and packing. Usually it is the couple of days before we leave, but we decided to do Athens by hotel, so Friday we will be parking François and heading into Athens.

Our plan in the morning was to spend the day in the campground in Delphi as it is really beautiful and quiet, but we wanted to give François a good bath. Usually we use a self service pressure washer like you see in the US, but apparently these do not exist in Greece. In Greece you hire someone to hand wash your car. The owners of the campground gave us two options for manual washes. When we arrived they both said we were too big. One recommended a place that does large vehicles but we could not find it. Finally we decided to fill François up with expensive Greek diesel, while we were filling I mentioned our desire to wash François to the attendant and he told me that the business next store washed cars and even walked me out to the road to show us where it was. Unfortunately he was too busy, on the way back to the campground I proposed we head towards Athens as it was still early and there was not much we could accomplish in Delphi except to enjoy the magnificent view and take care of our pride of cats. So that is how we ended up in Nea Makri tonight.

Ton had specifically requested we stop at Delphi as she had visited it many years ago on a trip when she was in school. She remembered it has the highlight of her trip to Greece then.

We were up bright and early as we had to take François to the site as the local bus service is on hiatus until spring. Our early arrival was rewarded with a primo parking space close to the entrance.

Delphi was the major religious site for the ancient Greeks. It was maintained as a religious site by the Romans after they conquered Greece, so it was used for religious purposes for around 800 years.

Originally it was the site of the Oracle of Delphi which features heavily in Greek mythology. Some of the stories of the founding of the site at Delphi attribute the selection of the location to Greek gods. Because of natural disasters and war it underwent at least three major rebuilds so it includes examples of buildings from multiple eras of Greek and Roman architecture and art.

There are three major building complexes on the site, the Temple of Apollo, the theater and the stadium. In addition to the major buildings there are many smaller buildings built by different cities in Greece to celebrate great victories over rivals. These are called treasuries and would be stocked with statues commemorating heroes as well as art work to celebrate the victory. Greek communities as far away as Marseille in modern day France built treasuries on site here. Right as you enter the site there are 5 small buildings which acted as the gift shops for travelers. Some things never change.

The site is very large and it is easy to get around now as modern walkways have been added. Ton said that was the biggest change since her visit in college.

The theater is quite large and relatively intact. Greek theater design heavily influenced how the Romans designed their theaters so it looked familiar to us.

The highest point of the site is the stadium. It is the first Greek stadium I have visited and the stadium at Delphi was the second most important in Greece after the Olympic stadium. The grounds were used primarily for racing and the decathlon. The stadium is in really good shape and you get a good feel for how the events must have looked.

We next visited the museum on site which houses the statues and other artifacts that have been found on site. It is a modern looking building but has been around since 1903.

There are 12 halls and all are filled with different statues and small bronze works. Many of the statues in the treasuries were bronzes but almost all were lost to scavengers who melted them down for the metal.

We were lucky because while the day was beautiful and warm the crowds were relatively small and we often had the whole gallery to ourselves in the museum which allowed us to take our time going thru.

After a short break for a snack in François, we visited two secondary sites. The Gymnasium (a kind of school) was closed today, but we were able to see the Tholos of Athena which was a secondary site for the original Delphi. It had an unusual round domed temple that was famous.

Delphi did not disappoint Ton on her second trip. We returned to the campground where Ton began cooking up all of the food in François as our time in him is winding down. We have acquired a pride of about 5 cats because we have both been feeding them bits and pieces of things from the fridge. Now whenever either one of us leave François we have a parade of cats following us around like we are the Pied Piper.

I am giving serious consideration to firing Greta our Garmin after today. The details on why will be below.

After 9 days in Missolonghi with our dear friends Cori and Ovi it was time to move on as we are near the end of our time for this trip. In the 12 years we have been traveling in a RV we have never spent 9 days in one place. But our time in Misolonghi went by quickly. Good company does that. Last night we were sharing our plans for the spring and since we both are including Turkey in those plans we are hoping we can arrange to cross paths again.

Our trip today was a relatively short 140 kilometers. Some was on a toll way and some on a good national road. It should have been a piece of cake. As a little background we have a US based Garmin with a European sim card produced by Garmin inserted in it. We bought the card about 10 months ago from Garmin so it should be up to date. Since we have entered the Balkans the quality of the maps has been so/so to poor. The speed limits on the Garmin differ so frequently and substantially from the posted speed limits that at this point I ignore what is on the Garmin. I suspect that they have not been checked at all and are instead going off some kind of formula based on the type of road and the location. Whatever they are using it is extremely inaccurate often varying from the actual speed limit by 30kph. A few times it has tried to send us down roads that appear to have been abandoned for years. In the past when traveling in France and Spain we have had minor issues with the Garmin, but since entering Croatia thru to Greece we have enough issues where I sometimes doubt the accuracy of the route I am being told to take.

Today was infuriating as we were on a major toll way heading towards Patras. To get to Patras you have to cross a large bridge that connects the Peloponesus region with the mainland of Greece. I knew we would have to exit before crossing the bridge as Dephi is on the mainland. With the bridge in sight Greta told us to exit in 1 km, the road signs indicated an exit in .5km which was visible on Greta as well, but did not indicate Greta’s exit. Something didn’t feel right but I decided to follow Greta. When we got to her exit it was blocked and appeared to have been closed for a substantial period of time.

The problem was there was no other exit before the Patras Bridge, and while it is a beautiful bridge and an impressive feat of engineering it costs €21 each way to use. Because of the inaccurate information on Greta Garmin we had to do a €42 turn around on the bridge. This is a major route and there is no excuse for the Garmin to not reflect the current routing of the roads on the toll way. €42 will buy a very nice dinner for two here in Greece and we had to throw it away because of Garmin.

The rest of the trip down the coast to our campground near Delphi was beautiful and uneventful (though the speed limits on the Garmin were completely inaccurate) and I would have really enjoyed the drive if I was not stewing the whole time over our expensive U turn. As we were approaching the campground Greta told us to turn down a road that was fenced and overgrown with bushes to enter the campground. The road had clearly been abandoned for years.

By the way the campground is stunning, one of the most beautiful we have stayed in.

We woke up to heavy rain on the roof of François so we both settled in for a lazy morning. Finally about 11 am the rain quit and we began moving about slowly.

Around noon Cory and Ovi showed up at the door and asked if we wanted to go for a walk. Ton was still in her pajamas but got dressed quickly and we headed into town for a Sunday stroll. Sunday is family day, and the restaurants in town were full of multi-generation gatherings. After walking around for a while we headed back to the marina for a break before heading over to Silver Cloud for dinner and a bottle of wine.

All in all a quiet day spent with friends.

We have extended our stay at Missolonghi because the weather forecast has taken a temporary turn for the worst. The first week we were here was pretty bad, but since then the weather has been nearly perfect. Overall the weather on this trip has been some of the best we have ever had. Today a front came thru in the late afternoon and treated us to a pretty spectacular thunderstorm and high winds. The severe weather only lasted an hour or so, but then it just drizzled steadily after that.

We were able to take advantage of good weather in the morning to head over to the farmers market in town. Ton shares a love of farmers markets with Cory and Ovi so we walked out of the market with a bunch of delicious olives, and fruit. A lot of the fruit trees seem to be at their peak so the selection was exceptional.

We used the rest of the day to take care of laundry, and to do a little prep for our departure. I even went out once the storm calmed down a bit and gave François a little bath using mother natures natural car wash. All in all a pretty quiet day.

The Greeks are really starting to win us over. We had very little planned for the day except for a walk to town. We spent some time in the morning working with Delta airlines fixing our flights as the leg from Athens to Amsterdam was canceled by KLM airlines. This is the second time KLM has done this on the trip, when we were coming they canceled the flight from Amsterdam to Paris, so we will be avoiding KLM in the future.

Cory and Ton had set up a brunch date for 11am so we were off to Cory and Ovi’s boat for omelets. After brunch was done we headed into town for an afternoon stroll. Ovi has an incredible sweet tooth so he took us on a tour of the bakeries of Missolonghi. At the second bakery Cory took Ton in to show her something. I was hanging around in the street when 4 Greek gentlemen sitting in front of the bakery asked me where I was from. Before we knew what hit us we were sitting down with them exchanging shots of Ouzo and telling our life stories. None of them were at all fluent in English, but that was not going to stop them from getting to know us. It took all of our willpower to break away from them before the shots of Ouzo got out of control.

Around the corner from the bakery was a Greek Orthodox church that Cory says has always been closed. Today it was open so we were tentatively peeking in when a very young Priest waved us in. Ton and I have noticed that many Orthodox churches don’t allow photos. When we went inside there was an older lady who greeted us with a big smile and a warm welcome in Greek. We pantomimed as best we could about whether we could take pictures, she ran out for a minute or two and then came back and told us it was ok.

The church was quite striking inside which we did not expect as Missolonghi is not a large town. We were really enjoying exploring the inside when we noticed that a crowd of people were coming in for a memorial service so we decided to take off. As we were leaving the priest came up and gave us icons from the church and thanked us for visiting.

After sitting down and eating a couple of pastries from our tour of the bakeries of Missolonghi we headed over to the grocery store to get a bottle of red wine that we had really enjoyed a couple of nights ago. As we were walking in the manager who had set up the delivery of our groceries greeted us like we were regulars, Stavros the delivery guy came up and gave Ovi a fist bump and continued to tutor him on Greek cuss words. George the cheese guy greeted us by name, and gave us a run down on what cheeses were good today. We made a new friend at the cashier, for some reason this store is the first one we have seen in Europe with Sriricha hot sauce from Thailand. It is the good stuff too. When we went to pay for it the cashier was checking it out and Ton and Ovi launched into a sales pitch on the merits of Sriricha, by the end everyone was laughing and she said she would buy some.

Most people are reticent about trying to communicate with foreigners if they are not fluent, the Greeks seem to thrive on it. It is incredibly charming and impressive.