Yet again, I’m off-air as we perk our pansies in Greece. While we’re away resting our weary old carcasses, here’s another random selection of images that caught my eye from both home and away. As usual, it’s a crazy mix. My favourite is the picture of the chair lift and mini funicular railway we stumbled across in lovely Lakka on Paxos as we made our way to the town beach. It leads to and from an old fella’s house who parks his mobility scooter at the bottom. Genius! Who needs a carer when you can do it all yourself? Shame it wouldn’t work on our twisty cottage stairs.
Tag: Greece
Athens, The Return
We’re getting greedy, Greece-wise. Two Hellenic adventures last year and two again this year. First up was our trip in July to perfect Paxos and the Venetian splendour that is Corfu Old Town. This time, we’re heading back to restful Aegina and the Bamboo Cottage, top and tailed with time in busy, buzzy, bustling Athens. Yes, it’s a partial reprise of last summer’s epic odyssey minus the ancient tumbledown ruins. Much cheap, local ‘workaday’ wine will be consumed. Stick to what you know and love, I say!
Sun, Fun and the Footie
We’ve finally recovered from our latest Hellenic odyssey to pretty Paxos and the Venetian glory of Corfu Old Town. While old Blighty baked under cloudless skies, we basked in Greek heat around a warm pool topped off by ouzo-fuelled steamy evenings of mirth and hot gossip with our travel companions. Thank you, you know who you are. A memory to savour was watching England beat Norway at the footie. We joined the rowdy crowd of many nations squeezed into cafés along the Liston, Corfu’s iconic Parisian-inspired arcade. Business was brisk as the drinks kept clinking and the tills kept ringing. Let’s not dwell on England’s later defeat by Argentina.
As for the rest, I’ll let the snaps do the talking…
Thanks to ‘Linda’ our official royal photographer for most of the pics.
Given the scorcher at home, I fretted that our little plot might wilt in the relentless heat. I needn’t have worried. Our neighbour did a splendid job with the watering can. Thank you!
Another Greek Intermission
I’m off-air as we perk our pansies on pretty Paxos. While we’re away tanning our wrinkly old hides, here’s a random selection of images that caught my eye. As usual, it’s an eclectic mix of snaps.
First up – a twinkly Christmas 2025.
Then we have our April anniversary celebrations and red wedding tulips.
Our room for all seasons.
And finally, the utterly bonkers.
Creatures of Habit
I think it must be an age thing, but these days, we’ve become creatures of habit. When we stumble on something or somewhere we like, we tend to stick with it. For us, familiarity breeds comfort, not contempt. So once again we’re jetting off to the gorgeous Greek island of Paxos, followed by a couple of days re-sampling the Venetian delights of Corfu Old Town, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Well, I say ‘jetting’, but it’s actually car, plane, taxi, ferry, then taxi again. This trip, we’re taking a couple of village people along for the ride. They like a drink too. Yamas!
Room With a View
When we first waded ashore to the fabled isle of Ithaca, we stumbled upon a tumbledown wreck of a house, perched by the waterside and overlooking a pine-dressed Frikes Bay. Sad, unloved and barely standing, a wonky For Sale sign hung precariously from the front wall. It was the ultimate doer-upper (or puller-downer and start again-er). But with such a glorious aspect and a view to sell your soul for, we expected it to be snapped up in no time and transformed into something truly magical. Over dinner, we fantasised about snapping it up ourselves. Romantic notions of the perfect place to live out our dotage were encouraged by the robust local plonk. The more we drank, the more possible it seemed.
Of course, the next day, reality dawned and all romantic notions of our place in the sun evaporated. Like many Greek islands out of season, not-so-idyllic Ithaca is cold, wet and closed, wild winter tempests could sweep us out to sea without a paddle and what about healthcare for our aging bones? Also, the prospect of trying to learn a new language with an unfamiliar alphabet made our old brains hurt. The booze from the night before didn’t exactly help. Besides, the curse of Brexit meant it was nigh on impossible anyway. That was two years ago.
Imagine our surprise when, this year, back in Ithaca, we stumbled upon the same tumbledown wreck with the same wonky For Sale sign hanging precariously from the front wall. We started to romanticise all over again. Well, an old boy can dream, can’t he? I wonder…
Idyllic Ithaca – the Return
It’s taken quite a while but we’ve finally recovered from our frolic-filled sojourn on Ithaca. For our second expedition, we were accompanied by a couple of fellow village people who added an extra helping of spice to the mix. We had a ball. We haven’t laughed so much in years. It was well worth the hour-and-a-half delay at Stansted Airport, the three-and-a-half-hour flight to gorgeous Kefalonia, the hour-long taxi trek across the island to the pretty port of Sami, the two-hour wait for the thirty-minute ferry to Ithaca – enough time for a liquid lunch – and, finally, the half-hour cab ride to Frikes.
Even the ferocious squadron of wasps sharing our breakfast buffet each morning didn’t manage to spoil our picnic. Neither did the nasty mozzie bite on my once pert posterior.
Our ouzo-fuelled romp was liberally sprinkled with hot-off-the-press gossip, laced with the lewd and the rude. Here’s a few choice phrases chucked into the drunken conversations. A bit of camp old nonsense, I think, but if bawdy double entendre ain’t your thing, then best change channels now.
“Need to get some water on my aubergines.”
“Our neighbour’s always going up my back passage.”
“Well, there was that time when my friend shat in a Pringles tube.”
“Apparently, Keira Knightley buys her onions from a veg shop in Bungay.”
“So, the doctor just shone his torch up my backside and said, nice and clean.”
“Oooo, you’ve got a lovely little foible!”
“You gotta keep your own hair on your own seat, right?”
“It’s true! She came home with a pickled foetus in a jam jar.”
“So there I was, just standing there holding my swimming teacher’s long pole.”
“It’s like butter off a water’s back.”
And the evergreen classic…
“So, is your cervico intacto?”
“Oo-er. Didn’t know you spoke Latin.”
Massive hugs to our splendid travelling buddies. Thank you for the good times to be treasured. You know who you are.
Idyllic Ithaca, we shall return again.
Take a Walk in My Shoes Again
While we’re perking our pansies on Ithaca, I’m reposting something from the time we first tasted the wine on Odysseus’ fabled isle. So ladies, gents and everyone in between, take a walk in my shoes all over again…
I gloriously misspent my youth trawling the sleazy dives of many of the world’s great metropolitan sin bins – London, Amsterdam, Paris, New York and Los Angeles among them – and cruising the hedonistic no-holes-barred gay fleshpots of Europe – Ibiza, Sitges, Gran Canaria, Mykonos. My dance card was rarely empty and I had a ball. But, there comes a time when the spirit is no longer willing and the flesh is in bed by midnight.
These days, a gentle week around a cool pool with a good book, a glass of something local and Liam by my side is what gets the pulse racing. Let me take you on a walk through laid-back Frikes, our latest tranquil bolthole, a cute village on the northeast coast of the pine-dressed Greek isle of Ithaca.
Heaven’s Gates
A few years back, we spent a truly heavenly time on Crete celebrating our 10th anniversary. It was so peaceful, so life-affirming, that we’re thinking of doing it all over again for our 20th next year. As I wrote at the time…
“Our Cretan idyll delivers unexpected familiarity. If I close my eyes, I’m transported back in time to another land of randy insects, loose goats, old men in tea houses and pine-smothered hills.
Ok, no headscarves or hassle, and the call to prayer has been replaced by the chimes of the local blue-domed monastery, but looking at the following snaps – the first of our Cretan digs, the second of our old stone house in Bodrum – you get my drift.”
That was then…
This is now…
Then, guess what we stumbled upon at the end of our recent modern-day Greek odyssey in a hidden corner of our Aegina hotel? We took it as a sign from the gods.
So we’ve decided to return to the place where the original odyssey of Homeric legend ended. Yes, we’re going back to Ithaca and, unlike Odysseus, it won’t take us ten years to get there.
Postcard from Aegina
Our modern-day Greek odyssey came to a sweaty end with a few days on the pretty island of Aegina, just a short ferry hop from the Port of Piraeus in Athens. We arrived at the port on the hottest of days and everything was overheating, not least Liam’s mobile phone, which decided enough was enough and shut down without warning. Unfortunately, our ferry e-tickets were loaded into his Google wallet, so blind panic started to set in. A nice young sailor felt our pain and let us board anyway.
Liam had booked the gorgeous Bamboo Cottage in the lush grounds of the Rastoni Hotel, and it was perfect – just the ticket for winding down and resting our weary bones after all that exertion clambering over tumbledown stones perched on hilltops.
Being so close to Athens, Aegina is popular with city day trippers and weekenders who like to party. Come sundown, the fancy harbourside bars and restaurants fill with trendy young things doing what trendy young things do everywhere – chatting, flirting, larking about and having fun. We preferred the backstreet bars where the ambiance is less frenetic for those of us longer in the tooth.
On our last night, just after the waiter had taken our food order, there was a sudden power cut, plunging us all into darkness. Memories of long lights-out nights in Bodrum came flooding back. After a few moments, a generator fired up. As the courtyard filled with diesel fumes, a small lapdog in a massive pink bow at the next table yapped in competition with the mechanical beat. Mercifully, mains power was eventually restored, the air cleared and we were able to eat our meal without the restaurant smelling like a petrol station or us choking to death.
We left the Rastoni Hotel the next day with fond farewells from our kindly hostess. She asked us to come back again. That would be a big fat yes.
I’ll leave you with an image of the Alps as seen from the window of our return flight. Missing Greece already! I feel another trip coming on.
