Week 44 - Varkiza and buying things for the boat

Adventures in Greece as we cruise the Mediterranean on our boat, an Adagio Sundeck 44 Trawler

🤷‍♂️ I swear we’re not making it up. We did buy a boat, I promise. Unfortunately we continue to wait for the PUTAIN FRANÇAIS to complete the de-registration so we can move forward. I thought Greek bureaucracy was bad until we met the French… in the meantime we’re continuing to bounce from Airbnb to Airbnb waiting on progress.

We moved from Vouliagmeni (which was VERY fancy) to Varkiza, which is less fancy, but still very pleasant. For the most part, the week consisted of relaxing, spending time at the beach, some swimming and heading up into Athens for some shopping.

Last week we proudly shared how we’d reduced all our belongings down to a couple of carry on bags again… yeah, well this week we blew that out of the water. Having disposed of three carloads of stuff from the boat, we now need to replace it with new bedding, new towels, a new printer etc. etc. etc. Safe to say that we probably have two carloads of things again!

Varkiza is a lovely small town, full of commuters, families and holiday homes for people in the centre — it’s really the furtherest you can go in Athens and still be “in Athens”. From here South, it’s empty land. All this means the beaches are cleaner and the food slightly cheaper. Like all parts of Athens, stray cats are every where. Rosie is fascinated by them and is always looking for them under cars as we walk down the street.

Glyfada is about 10–15 minutes away (€8) by cab and has almost all the same shops as the centre, so there’s plenty there for us to find. We spent a very productive afternoon loading up on the sort of things we need for the boat to make it our home.

On Friday we braved the city again — after two weeks of being out of the centre, it was eye opening to go back in again. So much hotter than down here on the coast and in just two weeks the tourist numbers have really picked up, it’s getting crazy in there! We had to visit the lawyer briefly and we also needed to get to a couple of stores that weren’t available in Glyfada — a key one was a specialist camping/outdoor store to get some waterproof bags for the boat as well as a head lamp with a red light as well as white (red is very useful at night on boats as it doesn’t destroy your night vision as much).

The speedboat course will continue in ten days time, so in the meantime we’ve decided to head up to Ioaninna which is a town in the North West of Greece, close to the border with Albania on a lake. It’s supposed to be very beautiful up there and it’s one of the parts of the mainland that we haven’t seen yet. The idea is to spend most of the week there and then go back past the boat next weekend to start on some of the chores (like polishing the stainless steel).

From a covid perspective, things continue to improve substantially here. While masks as still mandatory outside, it’s very common to see people with them under their chin etc. The numbers are improving every day — we’re down to around 350 cases a day now, and it’s less and less every week. It’s a far cry from the peak of the third wave where it was almost at 4,000 a day. With the exception of the masks, covid is having little impact on the day to day here now — a good thing! With the vaccination roll-out continuing to go seemingly well, it’s hopeful that by the end of August, things will be more or less back to normal again.

So overall a quiet week. We continue to float in a holding pattern and make the best of it — we’re certainly not bored, we are enjoying ourselves and staying busy, but from a “look at me” blog perspective, not much really going on right now! It will change next week as I’m sure we’ll have a large number of photos from our weeks trip away.

Until next time,

Tim & Karina.