It’s a Small World

The Journey

Greek Islands. Astonishingly clear water, rugged hills with the first few cyclamen popping up, goat bells tinkling, olive groves everywhere, some perfectly dressed while others have run amok.

Given a chance, I will always say yes to a trip to the Mediterranean. Walking on the hills I feel all kinds of empty spots in my soul filled like nowhere else I’ve been. And if your soul feels happy when you have hardly slept a wink for 48 hours, you know its pretty amazing.

Which brings me to: why on earth can I not sleep on airplanes anymore? We will say its just a stage, but it’s surely a maddening one. Maybe I’m teething. We flew from Sioux Falls to Kos with layovers in Chicago, Washington Dulles and Athens. Our Dulles layover was supposed to be uncomfortably short but we managed to hop on an earlier flight from Chicago. Just rocked up to the gate as they were boarding, asked if they had three available seats and 15 minutes later there we three were, all smug in our exit row seats that we didn’t have to pay a dime extra for. Very gratifying, that.

At Athens we had a little over five hours so we hopped on the train and took the hour ride to downtown and my all time favorite restaurant, Savvo’s, that I had been waiting to go back to since 2018. I got a baked potato as big as a dinner plate piled high with chicken gyro, cheese, lettuce and tomato. A sauce was poured over and it looked a picture. Tasted much better than a picture. Heath had a massive gyro bursting with goodness, while Zach indulged in lamb kebabs. We languished for an hour, used the WC with its sticky floor, de ja vu from 2018, and rode back to the airport. We were all pretty bunned at that point. Yay, even exhausted. Sharon and Bonnie, two of our companions had flown in from Winnipeg, so we spent quality time in our gate area looking groggily at each other and taking little breaks now and then to tip over and sleep.

From then on its all a little blurry in my brain to be honest. I know we flew to Kos, stumbled over to the rental car office located on a street corner where we inhaled a lot of second hand smoke and waited on them to get our car around.

According to Heath, who had gone there a few minutes earlier, they drove all the cars extremely violently, screeching tires, revving to shift and in general giving him great entertainment with their enthusiasm. It also put the sign into perspective. Eventually our little red car arrived with a squeal of tires and we were free to finally let go of our luggage and start the last 27 minute leg of our journey. Funny how one’s hands are so used to clutching your bags by that time it feels almost bereft to leave them in the trunk.

Milva Mare Luxury Apartments were indeed luxurious. Darwin and Kim along with their boy Dalen, and Andrew joined us after an hour or so, and after munching down some Gyros we all went to bed. Note I didn’t say to sleep. I think if you would add all our good sleeping minutes together it would have made for an excellent night’s sleep for maybe one and a half people. Which is excellent, really! In the big picture. Probably.

Exploring Kos

Sharon, Bonnie and I felt like we needed to officially begin our time in the Med with a sunrise swim, so 7:20 am found us shivering at the beach, working up nerve to wade on out. It was epic. As the sun rose and began to warm the earth, I turned a somersault in the clear, salty water and felt myself embracing the world! Almost a religious experience we said with a laugh, before heading back to the house with our towels flapping and our hearts filled.

Our first item for the day was the Thermal Springs, where we drove down a steep, winding road to the beach, dispersed into various cracks and clefts in the surrounding rocks to change and proceeded to bathe in the stinky waters. The area has an abandoned air about it, with the shell of an ornate building overlooking the Sea. I explored around in it, and near as I could tell it must have been a sanitarium or something. There were quite a-lot of little rooms with bathtubs. Thats all I’m basing my suppositions on. I didn’t want to take the time research. The spring is hot. Like can’t last very long in some spots hot. Its nothing fancy, just a largish area surrounded by rocks to keep it a little separated from the Sea. Cold water washes in as waves splash over the breakwater, making temperatures much more tolerable. Goats that eat everything, even clothes, as one guy said, roamed a little higher on the cliffs, so we didn’t have to post a guard over our possessions. Occasionally one of our party would go for a quick sea plunge only to return again to soak in the sulfurous warmth. As Darwin said, luxuriating in the bubbling depths “somebody had to do this”

Of course this gave us good appetites, so we had lunch before heading out on a hike up the highest peak on Kos. The hike was drippy, warm and the conditions were causing a cloud to remain stuck on the top. There was blazing sunshine down below, but as the wind would blow up the hill you could see vapor form and become dense cloud. It was different, seeing ghostly outlines of other people on the trail, beads of water on every leaf, and our hair started to get wet and frizzy. There’s a church and a hut at the top, as well as enormous bees. The fog broke enough for us to get some views, but not much. It still was worth it, as the trees and rocks were beautiful. A few crocuses were popping up and there were little yellow flowers scattered all over.

We found an abandoned castle in the woods at Pila next and spent an hour or so scrambling over ruins and wondering why there was a night stand set up with a pair of glasses and a banana peel in it. A chair was sitting next to it. I mean, why not? Who doesn’t need a night stand occasionally when you’re out in nature? I can think of lots and lots of people who would be delighted to find a pair of reading glasses just randomly waiting for them.

We took in sunset on the beach, surrounded by horse apples and occasionally the actual beasts themselves. Heath and I nearly missed the actual event as we were perched on an overturned boat and a wicker chair chained to a nearby stack of chairs and were pouring over weather maps and looking at route options for our sail the next day. They change the weather faster than we can keep up, but thankfully they have downgraded a fairly nasty looking system that was supposed to move through the area mid week.

We finished with supper and hot showers, and bed felt so good. For sure since we’ve figured out how to run the air conditioning units. Tomorrow we get on our boat and the real adventure begins.