Week 75 - Visit to Aegina

A visit to Aegina and cold weather starts… Adventures in Greece cruising the Mediterranean on our boat Matilda.

It’s been threatening cold weather all week and the will-it-won’t-it question of snow has FINALLY resolved itself this morning as I sit down to write this. The snow has started. We’re expecting snow on and off all day and up until Tuesday, so I expect we’ll see a good blanket of it on the ground. Right now the sky above is blue, so I’m not sure exactly where the flakes are coming from, but it’s still always exciting for these born and bred Aussies to experience it.

Which makes Monday all the more remarkable! We travelled to Aegina to see Matilda and enjoy a farewell lunch with Markus and Isa who were heading back to Germany. Most of the day we spent in T-Shirts. Yes, it was 11C but it was lovely and warm in the sun.

Matilda is coming along nicely, more work has happened and the old taps are now all replaced. We’re having some communication challenges with the shipyard, ironically they tend to move ahead too fast at times before we get input into what’s going on. The new taps are a BIG improvement, but they aren’t exactly what we would have picked. Still, overall it’s much improved.

Tuesday we moved apartments. Given we’re not heading to Germany now, the original plan of “a small place” where we stayed for a week or two, went down the drain. Instead, we’ve moved within the same building to a larger space with more room for us to spread out. Given the cold weather and the snow, it’s proving to be a decent choice. I have a separate space to work on my computer, Karina has room for a jigsaw puzzle, there’s a proper couch on which to watch TV. Luxury!

Another milestone for Tuesday was of course Jasper’s birthday, it’s a little strange realising that we no longer have any teenage children. We’re so proud of Jasper living independently in Sydney and are glad he was able to head back to work this week.

Tuesday evening we caught up with our friends Thymios and Ioanna at a Thai restaurant nearby and had a great meal with lots to chat about.

I’ve also continued to record the podcast and recorded a new episode (published) with Dad, talking about his time travelling through Syria. I hope it’s of interest to lots of people, but it’s certainly proved popular with the family as it talks about a bit of the “why” we ended up living in Jordan that I think as 8–12 year olds we weren’t really aware of. It’s available here https://anchor.fm/footloose There’s a new episode in the works with our friend Erik, talking about the challenges of working as a digital nomad and several other episodes planned.

Wednesday we headed into the city to meet with Maya, who’s managing the design for the new apartment. The plans are almost finalised, so we sat down in a cafe to go over them in more detail. Those of you who know Karina will know that she is the master of puns, and this meeting was no exception — we had to hand over cash which she’d placed into an empty washing detergent “pod” container. Aside from the seeing the plans, I think the highlight for her was handing over the container and when asked why that container, being able to respond “for money laundering” (it’s not, it’s just plain old everyday Greek style tax ‘reduction’, but let’s not ruin a good pun). She’s also planned the next container — an egg carton. I won’t spoil the pun ahead of time however.

Thursday and the cold weather started to kick in and we hung around the neighbourhood, but Friday was a burst of warm weather again so we headed out to Marousi to meet with our accountant. She’s been collecting letters for us and we needed to chat about a few things and plan for the tax year. We went to the local large scale mall while we were out there, bought a few new clothes while the sales are on, and enjoyed shopping inside in the warm for a bit.

Ella also headed back to the US on Friday, finishing up her holidays in Edinburgh and we were both relieved when she arrived safely and was able to re-enter the country. Travel is fraught with so many challenges these days due to COVID and last minute changing rules, it was good to know she made it back to complete her degree. Unfortunately the first two weeks is happening online, but hopefully things move back to in-person classes soon.

Finally on Saturday morning I ran my first Athens Coffee Tour! Karina mentioned it to Thymios at dinner on Tuesday, so he signed up and we had a lot of fun road-testing the tour, and the cafes as we walked through the city chatting about finance and NFTs.

Overall another quiet week, progress on a few things but the big plans ahead are holing up inside through the predicted snow over the next three days, more podcasts, jigsaw puzzles, keeping an eye on opportunities for travel in February and enjoying this quieter period while we can.

Until next time!

Tim & Karina