Breakfast was included with our hotel room, so we rolled down to the restaurant expecting the usual sort of “ploughman’s lunch” breakfast spread that most hotels in western Europe favor, but were pleasantly surprised by getting quite the spread — coffee, fresh squeezed orange juice, plus a menu to order from, of which I opted again for a full English breakfast. Sorry, no pictures included this time around. The beans were cold and the sausages were hot dogs rather than Cumberland sausages, but the mushrooms were amazing and the sausages were hot dogs! Heather ran into a little translation issue when she ordered an omelet with ham and red onions, and instead got a plate of fried eggs with slices of ham and raw red onions as garnish, but generally continuing our very good run of Greek meals.
The drive out to Lefkada was … interesting. The highways around Athens were fairly busy (and I will write about Greek drivers some day in the future) but once we got out of town and into the rest of the country, the highways mostly became empty despite being what appeared to be in pretty good condition. That’s probably due to the tolls which seemed to crop up every twenty miles or so. I think the drive out to Lefkada was probably more expensive than the drive from Landstuhl to Paris was.
We spent the drive partially trying to teach ourselves the alphabet. We did NOT do a good job of prepping ourselves linguistically to be in Greece. I knew maybe two words? and all of the knowledge I had of Greek letters came from a brief fling I had with it when I was like eight years old. (Better than H who only knew what was in her sorority letters.) But one of the things I HAD read said that the alphabet was the hard part — that because around FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND English words have their root in Greek, that it could be possible to intuit what words mean once you can figure out how to pronounce it. And this leads into the first word we learned, and the first of our Greek lessons!
exodos | εχοδοσ | exit
Learned this from highway signs and it was a lightbulb moment. The town names on the signage were all in both Greek and Roman letters, so being able to match the Greek letters to the Roman was made a little easier, and once you get on a roll (and once you start quizzing each other or correcting each other) then you just get in this confirmation cycle and … it helps.
We also spent WAY too long discussing whether “Heather” in Greek was “Heather” or whatever the Greek word for “a small purple flower from the Highlands of Scotland” is. It started because H wondered how to spell her name in Greek (where TH is one character and H is a vowel) (and which I now think is probably ΧΕΘΕΡ) but devolved into lots of bad examples of why this doesn’t work (most notably that this doesn’t work in reverse, and it doesn’t work for last names, “Mr. Cobbler” wouldn’t be called “Mr. Shoe Repair Man” in another country) and eventually divulged into the involvement of a girl from Scandinavia named Flaxflorgen who would be offended if she ever made it to America and was just called “Sandy.”
Anyways.
We got off the highway, following Apple’s directions, and while we were definitely getting close, Apple seemed to think that we were still over an hour from our destination despite being something like 12 miles from the island. Turns out this is because Apple had us off on crazy single-track backroads going through chicken farms and bare lands, and we ended up in a couple situations where oncoming traffic was … let’s say snug. In fact, coming down one hill, an oncoming driver flashed his lights more than once, and when we got to the bottom of the hill, we discovered it was because there was a herd of goats (with goatherd) blocking the road!
After goats and ruins and single-track roads, eventually we made our way across the bridge to the island, and then to the cottage. We met Nicos, the father of our host, who gave us a tour of the cottage (which I will also provide to you in some future update), and let us know that if we wanted lemons or oranges, to just pick them from the trees around the grounds.
A quick trip back into yielded spaghetti and garlic for a quick dinner, and then we turned in. Nice comfy bed and the windows open in December. Not too bad a life.
