All of a sudden, our mini break is nearly over.  A day by the beach has stretched into a week of book reading and swimming in the Ionian Sea.  We now begin to plot a route back home.

I had a moment on my birthday, as I sat floating in the sea and the small ferry pulled away from the harbour to back to Kefalonia where I felt such an urge to pack the van, the wife and the dog onto the next one and simply spend the rest of the summer ferry hopping right across the Greek Islands.  It reminded me of time back in our twenties in Thailand, we’d planned on spending a month on beaches, about three days in we wondered what else we were going to do because we weren’t going to manage the beach thing.  27 days later we were proved wrong, turned out it was easy.  

A nostalgic melancholy may intrude on perfect moments as you float in the sea but it was absent as I ploughed my way through the seafood platter we ordered for my birthday dinner.  It was something to behold and for a while it looked like there might be too many excess scraps for Chloe alone and we’d be forced to share with the plethora of stray cats lurking about, the three of us managed nicely.  

Chloe isn’t a reactive dog in the slightest.  She’s indifferent to other dogs, cats, Italian women and sometimes even us.  When we originally bought the van our old dog Gary was going to be our travelling companion. A combination of illness, pandemics, old age and general life events scuppered the plan but, in some ways, it worked out for the best because Gary would have lost his tiny mind amongst all these stray cats.  They would have sent him into a state of trembling excitement and we would have no peace while their presence over stimulated his senses.

Tomorrow, we feel is a good time to get moving but… there’s a part of us that isn’t ready to go just yet.  We’ll put that decision on hold until tomorrow.  But we want our trip home to be a bit more relaxed than the road down here, we want longer stops to unwind to experience places rather than destinations.  

But the beach is always a draw for us, we proved that 25 years ago in Thailand.  Greece has a lot of coastlines and the Black Sea isn’t that far away either….