Farewell Spetses.
Hello Nafplio.
Many happy hours spent wandering streets and catching up on our steps after a 15 minute crossing to mainland Greece.
The Cats of Greece pose, well executed.
I can feel warmth towards Greek cats knowing that it is not my back yard they are relieving themselves in. Travel makes me more broadminded and tolerant!
If you had to give up one word that you use regularly, what would it be?
Any number of swear words. I like to think I use them wisely and to make a point. But they slip out a little more often than they should, because I am a grandparent to impressionable small people.
Enough of my swear words.
The word I have used a lot today is luck and lucky.
For many more reasons than I need to go into here. Specifically because we took a ferry to a beach which looked like this four years ago
The owner made the decision to get rid of sunbeds, restrict trading to one taverna and have a well cared for public toilet.
The result for us was a quiet, peaceful beach approaching the end of the summer season.
Untroubled by mass tourism we swam and chatted on a near deserted beach. The water was crystal clear and we had a wholesome late lunch in the one remaining taverna.
Farewell Athens.
Last Athenian Breakfast.
Good Morning Spetses
The wreck of a breakfast at Spetses.
In-between a smooth ferry crossing and some evening wanderings.
So far our road trip is mostly about walking the streets of Athens. 16,000 steps in 30 degree heat today. Starting with an early morning trip to an art supplies store to buy more watercolour paper but also because the owner makes his own artisanal wax pastels. His store was fabulous and his work station at the back of the store was a riot of colour.
Handmade oil pastels.
I’ve never used oil pastels but these were sorely tempting. For the sake of luggage I bought a small tube of watercolour named Olive just to celebrate its Greekness.
Getting to the store was a fabulous trip of street graffitti and a ridiculously named Vinyl and CD store.
My self-portrait was taken on a tree that had been painted blue and decorated with shards of broken mirrors.
Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home.
Not a story about the furthest but a story about our current road trip before it even started. The only motorway that links us with our local airport was closed. An easy two hour journey became a tense four hour journey via A and B roads in Devon. Our flight was at 5:15 and we arrived at the airport at 5:05. Never were we so grateful for a delayed flight but regardless of the delay, check-in for luggage was very firmly closed. Thankfully we met some fabulous people and we were processed with kindness and expediency.
We arrived at 2 am and can reveal the start of our roadtrip.
Our first day was an odysea of coffee shops and nattering and a museum of Greek culture where I met this splendid fellow.
Goodness how I love this face painted in about 1870. A face so full of mischief I would be drawn to him at a party.
Has he just eaten the last pie?
Or farted?
Has he just heard the most salacious and delicious piece of gossip?
Is he trying really hard not to giggle?
I have no idea but he has brightened my first day in Athens. I will take his unusual portrait image with me on my road trip.
And this fabulous abstract created in a Sephora beauty product shop. Just nearby to our Airbnb.
What does your ideal home look like?
Our ideal home looked like it should be in a magazine. And it was.
It was planned to be our forever home but the urge to start again was too pressing. So now the name lives on as a blog . And Hugo still has to keep a paw on all the latest interior trends.
What brings a tear of joy to your eye?
The prompt from my blog host ( above ) exactly matched the blog I was planning to write. Yesterday tears of Joy/ mirth were shed as we enjoyed a coffee in a bikers cafe with two other bobbers.
It should be said that none of us have any actual experience of motorbikes. Two of us have, as the wall art suggests, shared the ride
Me at only a few days old when I was brought home from the maternity hospital in the sidecar of my dads motorbike. Rather more unusually Gill Bobber rode in a sidecar made of scaffolding poles when she had a biker boyfriend. This proximity to an actual motorbike allowed her to ride out with a motorcycle club. The name of which brought the actual tears of joy yesterday.
Just to prove I haven’t made this up to add pzazz to my blog, here is the map of the area just north of Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire.
The upper part of the road is called Slack Tops . Which has a scintilla of humour for all post-meno women as nature is not kind to older breasts.
Which leads me to the epic tears of joy which we shed yesterday. All four of us have substantial knowledge of 3D human anatomy. Sometimes that leads other people to ask us odd questions. Our friends had been asked by a fitness instructor if they could crochet a soft model of a pelvic floor so the instructor could more easily explain the importance and significance of pelvic floor exercises. Another essential for post-meno women.We puzzled over the problem and actually came up with a half decent design of such a thing. Including working parts. The tears of laughter were shed when we realised how long we had taken to seriously design a crochet pelvic floor and the consideration of making such a thing. Quite a different sort of engineering to the usual nattering in a bikers cafe I am sure.
As a cultural note, Slack Bottom, of Gill’s bikers club in Yorkshire, is just a little north of the grave of Sylvia Plath who wrote the best excuse for blogging that I know.
Everything in life is writable about.
And to finish, me, sitting on an actual motorbike. The only time in my life.
August 31st and it is still summer, only just, the summer tide is going out. But not before the bobbers managed a historic bob, with P.S Waverley the world’s last working Paddle Steamer coming into the background of their evening swim. A paddle steamer and three choices of cake. It really was an epic bob.
Our Cornish bobbers got to see the Waverley twice, catching her again on their return across the Tamar.
Still summer, a phrase that uses the word ‘still’ two ways.
It is still summer but summer has also slipped into its still phase. The last summer storm, Lilian, happened a week ago. She was a screamer for a few hours, rattling chimney pots and screeching up our cobbled back lanes before stirring the sea into a murky stew for a few days.
Since Lilian we have slipped into the still summer phase, no raging heat, gentle rains, crystal clear seas and some really lovely days. Not that I am looking at Summer 2024 with rose tinted glasses. She arrived shockingly late when June had already started and Spring hardly made an appearance. Tomorrow we hit the first day of Autumn/Fall, lets hope summer drags her heels a bit and leaves as late, if not later than she arrived.
Last night we went to see an art exhibition featuring the work of one of our bobbing friends.
She has been doing her Masters in Illustration.
We really loved her work.
But it is hard to show in a 2D format. Bobbers have played their part in her research, we sniffed our way through the olfactory part of her final project when we were very cold and damp. Glad to see our hard work paid off.
Another aspect that is impossible to share in this format. Regardless we are very proud of her and so happy to be able to give her a gentle squeeze. The poor woman has been acutely ill this week.
Not remotely linked to art, it is bobbing and Covid-19 that delivered her to us as a friend. As we walked around to look at other students work it was surprising how many people we recognised from other sea swimming or paddle boarding groups that use the Stonehouse swimming beaches.
Small worlds that collide.
All work © Debra Parkinson. Link below to artist information.
Every picture does not tell the story. This calm section of water was at the bottom of a huge waterslide. I was there to catch images of family members hurtling their way towards me having an exhilarating splashy ride to the bottom. This is evidence that I missed my moving targets. This image, though, feels very calm.
Another calm,watery image occurred yesterday.
Still water in the harbour as I walked to the bakery. Both accidental really. The greyness of the sky makes this image a little dull. But overlaying one over the other makes the combined image more vivid but there is still a sense of calm.
Isn’t life like that though? Something unplanned enhances the planned or expected outcome of an action or escapade. I am glad I didn’t just dump the first image because it was not what I wanted. It may become a very useful perker upper of photos that are not quite colourful enough. Just one tiny tweak and the whole image becomes a very believable sunset.
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