Alonissos Day 6

Ok – woke up today at 10am feeling very much behind the 8 ball, from the killer combination of alcohol and an uber late night. Definitely not a day to be operating heavy machinery. I think that this sort of thing will need to be looked at closely before attempting again.

We made ourselves look beautiful, and got John and Jasmin ready for their departure today. It was a cosy fit in the car with the 5 of us, and John and Jasmin’s bags in the small boot. The mighty Atos didn’t feel too mighty today either, and struggled going down the hill. It had been making a few weird noises in the rear suspension since our off-road rallying to Steni Vala (I believe I referred to it as Stela Valos the other day, so I will make sure that I call it by its correct name at least once in this blog), and these noises were only made worse by the extra weight that it had to carry.

We dropped John and Jasmin’s bags off at my room, as we didn’t want to be lugging them around for the couple of hours between returning to Patitiri and when John and Jasmin had to get on their ferry. As we were walking into Ilias studios, we came across my land lady, who gave us a very nasty look. I spent 5 minutes making sure that she understood that John and Jasmin weren’t moving in with me, and that their check-out time in Chora had been midday, and they were just leaving them here until 4pm. Once she understood the funny wa-wa-wa words that were coming out of my mouth, she broke into a big grin, and wished them well on the rest of their travels. Again, a case of fascists being misunderstood.

We decided to once more have omelets for breakfast, accompanied by the coffee and orange juice of the nicer of the two restaurants on the waterfront where I had sampled their wares. It was a very nice way to break fast on the final day with the 5 of us all together. After breakfast, we all went for a wander and did a little bit of souvenir shopping, finding some calendars with amazing pictures of the Aegean, a couple of bags with the Cats of Alonnisos (happy, sleepy, playful, and winner, which had a fish on a plate).
As 4 o’clock was coming around, we headed back up and grabbed John and Jasmin’s bags, and escourted them… sorry, accompanied them to the dock, where they caught a hydrofoil to the isle of Skiathos, one of the many ‘party’ islands in the Aegean. John informed us that the island had a stretch of bars 12kms long, which he was looking forward to doing a pub crawl along, and would not stop until the end, even if he had to crawl and tug on the pants of people to buy him beers at the finale, Amy Winehouse style.

Lapzang, Doolittle and I had been attempting to find out more information about the next part of our journey, the bus from Thessaloniki to Istanbul, from travel agents in the Thessaloniki area. I had an e-mail waiting for me at the internet café, giving us the number of a man called Mr Arsos (what an unfortunate name!) that we called and reserved a couple of seats on his bus. We were greatly relieved, as we hadn’t been able to find any connections that would work with the time that we got off the ferry, at 10pm.

Lapzang, Doolittle and myself decided that since the temperature pipped 40 today, we would get a few items and have a cool dinner up at their place. After shopping, we headed up to their place in the Old Town, and prepared a meal of dolmades, salad, tzatziki, and little toasty bits to go with it. Once the evening had cooled down a little bit (to the mid 30s), Lapzang fired up the coal bbq there, and we roasted some peppers and zucchini, which were amazing.
After dinner, Lapzang and I went for a wander to the local store to get some water, and discovered a nice little ice-cream store there, which we raided for all we were worth. It was stinking hot in the shop, and by the time that the lady there had served up Lapzang’s and Doolittle’s ice-cream, mine was already melting. We hurried back and consumed the ice-cream with great gusto, a fantastic way to top off the evening. We sat around chatting for a couple of hours, while I re-sewed buttons onto my new shirts. Hey, for 10 Euros, I wasn’t expecting amazing stitchwork, but hadn’t thought I’d have to do surgery on the clothes so soon.

Lapzang and Doolittle drove me back down to my studio, commenting on their jealousy of my air-conditioning the whole time while I laughed evilly. Or would have if I had had the energy. Our booze free day had been very good for us, although I topped off the night with a few night-caps of the final fingers of my duty-free vodka.