Category: 2023

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.