GREECE - Miscellaneous

As I post this last blog from Greece (temporarily) it's another beautiful morning and we are anchored in a small bay in Corfu.  The weather has been 'toasty' (around 34C every day) and the sea temperature is not much less.  Heaven for me, but for the many British people who visit this area at this time of the year it is "too hot"!

We are off to Albania later this morning, a short 8 nautical miles away, and will spend several days in Sarande visiting some amazing historical sites as well as beautiful villages.  In preparation, I am reading "Chronicle in Stone" by Ismail Kadare: a semi-autobiographical story of a boy growing up in war-time Albania in a town which we will hopefully visit.  Stay tuned...

In the meantime, here are a few words that came to mind as we motored along the other day:

One of the most frequently asked questions we are posed is “What do you do all day?” To those of you who love an adventure-filled, action-packed day, our lives would probably seem very mundane and boring.  We don’t have a routine (other than I like to clean the boat once a week and do laundry at least once a week), and we pretty much go where we like and when we like.  If we arrive in a place which looks worth exploring, then we swim, kayak or dinghy ashore and walk around.  If not, we anchor, go for a swim (we do this pretty regularly every day!) lie on the trampoline and read, write our blog, check emails (when we have internet reception), and sometimes Robin bakes cookies or brownies or some sort of treat.  We have our Isagenix shakes for breakfast except for when we treat ourselves to French toast or pancakes (once a fortnight or so), often skip lunch or eat a late one (salads mostly) and then have a BBQ for dinner.  It’s amazing how the time passes!  Of course, if we are moving from one place to another, time is taken up with the passage – hoisting and lowering sails, charting a course, etc.  We usually run the watermaker almost daily to top up our tanks, especially if Robin does laundry which depletes the supply somewhat.  We are fortunate in being totally self sufficient with our solar energy so that we can run both the watermaker and the washing machine at the same time if need be.  In  the evenings, we play our guitars, sometimes watch a movie or tv show from the huge variety downloaded by our boys onto a hard drive attached to the television.  Occasionally, when in a town, we even get local television and can watch the news or a show in English.  If we meet some people that we want to socialize with in an anchorage, we can often be found chatting over a beer with them on their boat or ours.  It’s so much fund sharing sailing stories and finding out where people have been.  We are often in bed by 10pm to read until we fall asleep…never bored!