The ferry from Ancona was rather luxurious and we were determined to enjoy every minute. Just as we had chosen our meal at the cafeteria our names were called out over the ship’s tanoy and K had to leave his hot dinner and go investigate why were being called. Would you believe it, we were given a free meal lunch ticket just after we had paid for our meal. Never mind, we thought, we will use this for lunch tomorrow and our meal was warming and very welcome.
We had a bit of a lounge about because there were gales and rain going on outside – so sitting outside on deck was out of the question. We checked out the shop, the swimming pool, the wellbeing centre (= beauty treatments, sauna, Jacuzzi etc but thought that we should probably conserve our cash for later. All in all it was a good break and K made the most of the opportunity to rest from driving and unwind a bit. On presenting our free lunch ticket to the cashier for lunch the following day, we were informed that lunch was free for everything on the menu except fish. … And you guessed it; we had chosen fish – so our free lunch did not happen. The fish, however, was excellent,
The spanking new vessel boasted of Internet and I hopefully sat down to start my blog. First I asked the Receptionist where to go. Go to the Bar to pay and come back to Reception for a password. This involved several flights of stairs and walks up and down the ship both ways – especially as the password did not work, the keyboard made it very difficult indeed to use @ without using various other keys to make it operate. So all in all my hour was up before I could really get started and I got into a muddle with all the different passwords needed.
We arrived at Patras at teatime and quite a scene awaited us. It was Carnival (before the beginning of Lent) and, terrifyingly everyone was out in the streets in fancy dress costume with music blaring from every lamp post. I was clinging on for grim death as K steered the car around all these partygoers. As we arrived at the hotel, there was a great flurry of families all dressed to the nines in fancy costumes for an evening out en famille. It was good to see and great fun. K and I wished we had a silly hat or something we could adapt to enjoy the fun but nothing was mineable from the depths of the luggage in the back of the car.
The weather was wet, cold and we fiddled with the hotel room air con heater on the wall to get warm. After the huge meals we had had shipboard, we went to bed without supper and watched a very bad American film on TV with Greek subtitles which was difficult to differentiate with the Coca-Cola adverts!
We sat down to a Creta Beach style enormous breakfast buffet the following morning – in fact the place we were staying at reminded us very much of our first trip ever to Crete when the children were all with us – to the style of the hotel and the bungalows beside the beach. Our son had been at junior school at the time and spent most evenings searching for “creatures” by torchlight– much in the way of “My family and other animals”. This time, however, the rain did not stop and we had a lake outside our french windows with pine cones floating about in it. K and I both feel that we have sucked cloud, wind and rain from England with us and wonder if we will ever get the chance to put some lighter weight clothes on!
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