It’s a Small World

Talk about sensory overload, coming into Rhodes! Gone were our friendly little islands with maybe 10 boats moored, a few scuzzy Super Markets and endless beauty. Enter, an enormous Cruise Ship, having to radio the Marina for permission to enter, €70 docking fees, 4 lane roads and tons of construction. Outrageous Super Yachts line the boardwalk and loud music and strobe lights poured out of a classy bar. Yuck. The harbor isn’t even a great place to stay. In spite of the breakwaters, huge swells somehow work their way in and we spent our night rocking madly to and fro. And can you do your own laundry? No way. It will be done for you and delivered to your boat, thank you. Which, in all reality, is rather handy. I mean, I think it is. We haven’t actually checked to see if it was returned as promised.

Our fleet now includes, besides the boat, 4 motorbikes and a car. The planned field trip was a visit to St Paul’s Harbor, which is where Paul the Apostle would have landed on Rhodes. It was a 55km drive on a large highway, so that was too bad. It was 30km before I saw my first goat roaming around and finally felt better. The harbor itself is stunning! If you can photoshop out the large Yacht moored in the middle, the dozen or more divers bobbing around, the high dollar restaurant on the shore, and the sophisticated pay toilets, you can almost get the vision of Paul sailing in. But as of 2024, it is a great big tourist trap. They charge you €2 to breathe once, and if you have to again, it’s €3. Ok, so maybe not, but you get the picture. And it was swarming with tour buses and their inhabitants. Needless to say, we still enjoyed the ancient acropolis on top of the hill, drank in the spectacular views, and then left. The Tilton’s fleet of bikes headed for lunch at Zeus, a restaurant in a much less touristy town. The food was the best we’d had yet! Absolutely perfect gyros. When we storm around on these bikes I always think about the book Bears On Wheels. To be specific, it’s the second last page I always see. Twenty-one on none.

From Zeus we headed inland and found the Seven Springs Tunnel, which is an underground aqueduct that you can walk. Its about 400m long and has an escape hatch halfway. You walk in ankle deep water and pop out the other end at a beautiful teeny lake with a waterfall. The aqueduct continues above ground and disappears through the woods. There’s lots of trees on Rhodes. It hardly feels Mediterranean as you drive among the pines and see streams. We were having so much fun away from the maddening crowds that we decided to go find the abandoned Sanatorium that Forrest had read about. It’s part of an Italian Settlement that was established during the Italian Occupation in the early 20th century, and first served as a hospital for the Italian soldiers. In the ‘30’s it became a Tuberculosis hospital, where they believed in good care, but also the idea that fresh mountain air and nature were healing as well. It’s truly gorgeous around there. I can imagine getting better from almost any disease in that setting! The advent of antibiotics eventually made the sanatorium obsolete and it was abandoned. Now you can prowl to your hearts content, crunching on chunks of plaster and glass, peering into small cubbies and climbing curving staircases that led onto roofs and balconies. Totally epic.

It was back to Rhodes after that and touring the ancient city there. The stadium is amazing but the best ever was the Palace of the Grand Master of The Knights. It’s a huge palace built in the medieval times and of course changed and wrecked and restored. The Italians did a huge restoration, again during their occupation, and had a medieval reconstruction guru make it as near to the original as possible. It was then used as a vacation home for the Italian King and Mussolini. Its a museum now, and you can walk through the rooms and goggle at the amazing marble, mosaics and general ancient-ness. Definitely a place worth going to!

We all met up for supper at Niko’s Gyros in Old Town and compared our days. Robs tried to reach the highest mountaintop on Rhodes but didn’t quite make it cause the road was too bad. Zach’s had an unfortunate incident involving setting a phone on the car roof and forgetting it, watching it fly off and land, and not finding it when they could finally turn around and go back. They could track it to an olive grove with goats. After searching an hour or two they gave up. Super depressing. Apparently they had had good swimming and snorkeling before that, thank goodness.

The bikes had to be turned in in the evening, so we couldn’t buzz around quite as efficiently. It really didn’t matter because the weather was gorgeous and the harbors beautiful, all lit up in the darkness. We stopped and got the details from the co skipper of a trimaran that had been drifting willy nilly in the marina in the morning. We heard their frantic cries for help on the VHF, and they said they had lost their transmission and were drifting. The wind was puffing pretty bad, so their position really was quite perilous. There were quite a few million dollars hanging out, just waiting to be crunched. They managed to lash it to a dock with minimal damage. Rosemary said that it was actually a prop issue that made it impossible to put the boat into gear. Man, that would have been a sweaty few minutes! We about broke into a sweat just watching! As a point of interest, this Rosemary and her husband Simon live as full time crew on that trimaran. The owners come in summer to do some cruising, but they don’t have a hot clue how to actually run the boat. Simon and Rosemary do all the work, and every winter they bring it to an Egyptian port on the Red Sea and do maintenance. Quite the life!

FYI, our laundry came back clean and folded. But either I’m indulging too much at the bakeries, or my swim shorts came back shrunk. Beings Rob’s socks were suddenly way too small, I’m going with the latter.