Back in Blighty again.

We flew back to the UK on a pleasant Saturday lunchtime flight to Manchester followed by a train back to Guiseley to pick up Lynns brothers car. We have just 2 weeks to catch up on folks and get ready for our big adventure for the summer, 2 months on the north west Pacific coast of the USA. The usual 2 weeks of dashing here and there tied up with last minute shopping and packing for the USA. It was a busy time and seemed to fly by. I think by the end of it we felt we were ready for the off with everything we needed for the the trip. The only problem was baggage weight. As we were camping in most places we had a case full of camping gear so we didn’t get many clothes in!


Our trip was taking us to Seattle from Amsterdam where we had a night in a motel before picking up a hire car the following day and heading south down highway 101 the Paific coast highway. We have a few stops planned along the way and the turn around point was San Francisco. After afew days here we were heading inland to Yosemite and then heading back north to Seattle via some State Parks along the way. A night in Seattle, then the train up to Vancouver in Canada where we pick up another car for a couple of weeks before getting the train back to Seattle, to see Seattle this time before the flight back to the UK. Well that’s the plan, I’ll try to keep up with the trip and report back along the way.

Job team arrives.

It was Easter Monday – well UK Easter Monday as Greek Easter Monday was the following week. No idea why. The job team arrived on the evening flight from Manchester so we drove down to pick them up via the supermarket in order to stock up on supplies. The next day was a super day with plenty of sun and not too hot so we managed to get well on with the start of the new roof. By Friday the roof apart from a couple of roof panels was complete and my dad had started knocking down the apotheki doorway. So far so good, not quite. Easter in Greece is far bigger than Christmas and as a result Greece shuts down for 3 days to mark the occaision. This is fine if you haven’t run out of sand and cement!! So we were out of work for 3 days which didn’t go down well with the team.


On Greek Easter Saturday we went down to Corfu town to see the famous pot smashing in the Liston square. We got down there for 10ish and wandered steadily up to the Liston. At bang on 11 o’clock all hell breaks loose and terracota pots of all shapes and sizes are hurled from all the balcony windows as high as 6 storeys. Quite a spectacle with no cops, no barriers, no warning signs and nobody gets hurt!! Well worth the visit. Sadly since the first day of sunshine on the Tuesday the weather has not been so good, a mixed bag of cloud and showers.

We all managed a stroll over the weekend by San Stefanos on the east and it stayed dry so it wasn’t too bad. At the crack of dawn on Tuesday morning I was down at the builders yard filling the car with sand and cement so we could proceed with the apotheki door. All was well again and we managed to get the building work finished and the new door put together before the team departed on the Friday eve. All that was left was to paint the new door and hang it, which we did and it looks so much better.

With the team now gone and it’s Saturday morning and the sun was shining again and continued to do so right up ‘til we left to fly to the UK 2 weeks later.

Jobs to be done

The main reason for the trip out in March was in fact my dads idea. He said he didn’t mind helping build the roof over the decking as long as he didn’t have to do it the blazing summer sun. So at the end of last summer we bought all the wood and painted it so it would harden over the winter. Was a good idea at the time but we said if we finished the roof in good time we would then put a roof over the car port as the plastic sheet I used didn’t stand up to much wind. Before my dad and Reg arrived we did the roof over the car port and found another job for the task team. This meant we had used a lot of the wood we painted last summer and had to get some more which Mrs D had to paint with a bit of grumbling. The wood was painted before they arrived and the holes were dug for the support posts to go in. The new job we found was widening the apotheki door so I can put my motorbike in there during the summer out of the sun. We had had 2 weeks of superb early spring weather and all this changed the day the job team arrived!!

Off again



Ferry down Adriatic

 We are back on line again and in touch with the world!! Yes yes I know I said I would do more to keep up to date with our ramblings and there has been nothing since March. I humbly apologise but there was good reason, it was all to do with wireless broadband contracts and the short time we were in Corfu but I’m sure you’re not interested in all that anyway.


It’s 16th May, we’ve been back in the UK just over a week and we are gearing up for the off again very soon. Never mind that what’s been going on I hear you ask?

We left the UK on 16th March after our stay with Marian on the south coast and had a super drive across Europe with a couple of stops. One at Leige in Belgium at an F1 hotel and the other at a hotel we usein Altenstadt, Germany. The weather was great, the Alps were superb and all was going well. We arrived in Venice intent on going to a campsite we kow to get a cabin for the night. We checked on their website before we left home and it said ‘open all year.’ In my understanding that means open all the time. No, it was closed so we had to go to plan B which we didn’t have. In short we drove around looking for an open campsite to no avail. We ended up shelling out mega Euros for a hotel near Marco Polo airport. Oh well, these things happen as they say.

Next day, checked in for the ferry and got a good spot in the reclining eat room again. Steady cruise down the Adriatic to Igoumenitsa on the mainland as the Venice ferries have stopped docking in Corfu through the winter months. We arrived at Igoumenitsa to an unusually quiet port. Super, the Greek ferry operators were on strike over the austerity issues. So we were stuck on mainland Greece. After a call to a Greek friend in Corfu we found out the strike could be over that day or go on for another 48 hours. The outcome was due at 6pm that day. The upshot of which was the strike was over and services were set to resume.

Services did resume, the following day! We spent the night sleeping upright in the car, lovely…………At 0600hrs I had to wrestle my way through a mass of angry Greeks to to get a ticket for this first ferry. As you can imagine after a two day strike there would be a few folks knocking about, not a pleasant situation. We did manage to get on the first ferry which was bursting at the sides and finally docked at Corfu at 0815hrs.

It was a quick shop at LIDL on the way and we were back home for 0930 and asleep by 10 o’clock.

All was well with the house, the weather was nice and it was god to be back. We now have two weeks to get sorted and ready for the arrival of the workforce – my dad and Lynns brother – on Easter Monday.