The Weekend Update
Truth is, even when you set off on what could be the adventure of a lifetime, it soon becomes clear that you simply become an adventurer in your everyday life and your adventure simply becomes...everyday life.
I am sitting down to write this and its already creeping up on the end of June, 2022. Its almost a year since we left the Netherlands.
I think it was early July by the time we actually set off down the canals and almost got stuck in a loch. It was exactly a year ago we were meant to leave but got delayed because our hired Skipper got delayed thanks to someone on his flight to Poland testing positive for Covid!
So much has happened since that point, one of which is that myself and the kids ended up getting infected with Covid back in March of 2022 while we were at the tail end of our two months in India. India was such a wonderful homecoming experience for me and for them, Covid was just the icing on the cake because it gave us a much needed boost of immunity against the virus, I know this for a fact because when Jeroen got Covid at a later date in Sicily we found we tested negative despite not isolating from him for over two weeks. When Jeroen got Covid in Sicily it was because he had been exposed on a plane trip to Norway and back for a job interview.
You know the drill by now. You test before you board, you test, test and test. Well, when the kids and I got Covid in India it was from my brother who tested negative before his flight to come visit us from Singapore. He ended up getting sick first, complaining of feeling feverish before succumbing to aches, pains and a cough that bellowed into the night. The rest of the family fell like dominoes, my Dad first, then the kids, then me and finally my mother. My sister had very little chance for exposure but she ended up getting Covid not more than a few weeks after that while she was with her family, they all ended up testing positive. By the time Jeroen got Covid it was in May of this year, some time after we'd returned to Marina Di Ragusa, Sicily, and we isolated with him on the boat for two weeks.
I think by now everyone out there has a story about how they unwittingly got Covid despite standing strong for nearly 3 years, lol. I think our story of Jeroen actually flying in and out of Wuhan at the start of the pandemic being common knowledge is enough to make us giggle about the fortitude of dodging that bullet this long, or at least we had no idea if we had ever been infected prior to 2022, anything is possible because back then we weren't all frantically self-testing, jabbing q-tips up our noses and praying for the best!
We left Marina Di Ragusa as soon as Jeroen had managed to do all his requisite simulator exams, putting him on a track to return to flying. We left around the 11th of May, 2022. From MDR we headed straight across to Argostoli, Greece.
It was a 2 night, 3 day crossing that certainly had us fatigued but it was overall uneventful. The winds weren't with us so we motored most of the way. Not going to lie, I actually welcomed that break because it had been a while since we'd sailed through nights and days in a row and they always take a toll on me. Reality is that I am stumbling through peri-menopause and I end up with all sorts of hormonal symptoms when I am poorly rested or my cortisol levels are high.
For the most part we have all maintained good health this year, touch wood. Other than all of us getting Covid at some point, a virus that took a recovery period of about 5-14 days total, the only other minor hiccup has been when Micah got scratched in the eye for antagonizing the cat. He got lucky, I tell ya! He'd been getting up in her face when she finally swiped at him and caught the inside of his lower eyelid. It was truly fortunate that it was a bleeder because this meant that the wound naturally had a chance to "rinse" itself. We then rinsed it further with sterile ampoules of saline solution before applying antibiotic eye drops in his eye. I had brought a few "first aid kit" items from India, the eye/ear drops was one of them because you never know when a kid will get an infection and if you are in the middle of the sea, you can't exactly call your doctor, can you? Well, three days of drops, a rule of "no swimming" (which impacted him more than the cut itself) and he was perfectly fine.
We are pretty cautious with the kids, not entirely all wrapped in cotton wool, but we remind them constantly about our life choices and how being careless can cost us time and money, if not a life. Micah seems to be the only one who is, just by sheer misfortune of youth, constantly chasing injuries purely because he's overestimating his cat skills, who knows...he has been gouged in the knees time and again since his experience in Gibraltar when he needed stitches after some monkey business. We've learned to just do our own first aid after assessing the damage and weighing the risks. Jeroen and I have both taken a proper Ocean Survival course and First Aid Course for sailing, so we know what we are doing, as long as its nothing like being stabbed in the chest by a marlin or poisoned by a blue ring octopus, we should be safe in our self-confidence and first aid proficiency.
Since leaving MDR and making the crossing to Argostoli we first headed for Kefalonia before we made it to Ithaca where Jeroen's Mum and her partner live. Lilia is such a lovely human being, I like her a lot, so it was just a perfect chance for us to see more of her, for the kids to be reminded of who their grandma is and for my husband to get to spend much needed time with his mother. The older you get the rarer these opportunities become, especially if you live a nomadic life like we have for the past year. Even this past year aside, both Jeroen and I have lived the life of an expat from birth, neither of us can actually say we call a country our home. The constant moving around the world, living on different continents than your close blood relatives, marrying someone from a different culture...it all adds to the distance. We are both third culture kids and our kids are even more so, third culture kids.
While we were in Ithaca my father came to visit us and this was the first time he had met my mother-in-law! After fifteen years of Jeroen and I being together, this was the first time for Jeroen's mother and my father to meet! My mother had met Jeroen's mother back in 2017, I think, when I was in the Netherlands and when we still had the apartment there. Even back then when my mother finally met his for the first time, it was ten years into our relationship. Such is the life of an expat. Such is the life of a family when you don't make a big deal of fancy weddings or when its not your first wedding, lol. We had both been married and divorced before we met and married each other, the need for all the pomp and circumstance kinda loses its mystery. When you have been married and divorced, you know exactly what you are signing up for and you do so without the need for a show. The downside is that your families don't get that prerequisite awkward opportunity to mix and mingle over cocktails and canapes, not unless you tell them what you are doing, and in our case we kind of didn't, at least not until a while after the deed was done, again, a very personal decision to not make a big deal of choosing a life together until death do us part.
His trip to Athens was made possible because after several years of Covid throwing a spanner in the cruise line world, him and my mother were finally able to go on a cruise and they chose London to Ireland and Iceland as their 15 days of leisure travel on the high seas. Having to fly to London from Bangalore was a good enough reason for him to put Athens in his plans and so he left two weeks ahead of my mother, came to Athens, did some work before hopping a bus for 3 hours and then a ferry for another 3.5 hours before we picked him up at the port near Vathy.
My father is a trooper! I did the journey to Athens with him on his return so we could continue on his work rounds, with him proudly telling others that I would be taking over from him...although I have no idea how he sees that happening, it was still another great opportunity to spend time with my Dad and assist him with his work any way that I could. We got lost...a lot. My word, from the moment we got off the bus in Athens it was quite the adventure of Dad losing things and then me trying to figure a solution. I worry about him, but then I remind myself that if I hadn't been there with him he'd have lost shit on his own and figured out how to make it work...without me there to help him. I have faith in his ability to make his way around the world on his own...sure it may take him a lot longer, but he will always get there in the end. He's like a young teenager, headstrong, stubborn and inattentive as all hell. The crazy thing is that he's always been that way, so why the need to worry about it now? Also, seeing him at his age, doing what he's doing, it gives me hope that I am not gonna be such a lost cause as I creep up to my eighties.
I left Athens after I had ensured my father had made it to the Airport to catch his flight to London to meet up with my mother before they were meant to board their cruise ship. The journey from Athens back to Ithaca was plagued with terrible thunder storms and rain, I got soaked by the time I got off the bus and boarded the ferry, I spent the 3.5 hour ferry ride with paper towels in my shoes and was grateful that I had spare clothes with me and that the restrooms on the ferry were very clean.
By the time the ferry reached Vathy the sun was back out again and the temperature was a blistering 30 plus degrees. The summer sunshine here in Greece is spectacular and unforgiving. Our whole family lives under a layer of sunscreen all day long, the words "skin cancer" come up often as we scare the kids into applying sunscreen themselves and yet we are still so tanned that we no longer have freckles visible! SPF 50, UVA, UVB, zero cloud cover, who cares because I am loving Greece, we all are.
Its such a beautiful country, the people are lovely, the weather is hot but not entirely unbearable on the boat thanks to the sea being so crystalline blue, cool and inviting. We jump in the water, straight off the side of the anchored boat, maybe three to four times a day. The water being as clear and clean as it is, we are managing to use the water maker and make water almost every other day, so rinsing off after a swim isn't a guilty pleasure.
We have anchored throughout our journey through the Ionian and are still anchoring as we head over to the Aegean. The weather has been great but occasionally the winds have been pretty strong and through it all our anchor has held.
Our next expected visit will be from my brother, Andre, who is also coming to Athens on business. He's set aside two days to fly out to meet us and so in turn, we have made it our mission to sail to Crete to meet him. Crete is just a 50 minute flight from Athens, so it was the easiest solution to arrange a reunion in Greece.
Living this nomadic life, a life of sailing and close quarters, its rare to find someone willing to make it all the way out to see you, and Greece is not a small country! I have had so many friends come to Greece this summer, from my oldest friend from the United States to more friends who are coming in the coming month, from Ireland. You can't even begin to imagine what it feels like to be so close and yet so far, if it were at all possible I would have loved to meet them all here in Greece, but there is only so much time and a boat can only travel so far at the right time. Weather permitting, we travel about six nautical miles an hour. Its a lot of hours to get from point A to point B in comparison to taking a bus, plane or car.
Today we are headed to another anchorage in a bay on the Peloponnese. We are making our way from one finger of the peninsula to the next, slowly as we inch our way to Crete. Last night we anchored in Koroni and that was a bit rough, winds of up to 20 knots and swells through the night, neither of us slept great. Hoping tonight will be a good nights sleep.
I look forward to seeing more of Greece, I know I said Italy was beautiful but in comparison, Greece is exquisite!
Its like the further into the Med we have travelled the more stunning the places and the food gets! I am genuinely looking forward to our winter in Turkey. We've already found an apartment to stay in, thanks to Airbnb, and its going to be in Fineke, overlooking the sea. The reason we picked an apartment is purely because we are concerned about surviving the summer temperatures on the boat in a marina without air-conditioning. We also need to have work done on the boat and its better to get that done without having to live aboard when its being done.
I hope to get to update you again, a bit more regularly in the coming months. Now that we have unlimited wifi, I have no excuse. :)
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