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That’s a wrap

Yesterday was a long hot day in Tirana. Had to check out of the hotel at 10:30 but flight wasn’t until 645, theoretically. Andrew and I walked through the heat and saw some new places in the city. Luckily for me we got caught up in a long parade of Albanian children in traditional dress. They were playing their instruments and chanting songs and posing for cameras. We walked with them for about a mile. Then we walked back through a park to a lake, and checked Andrew in at the Marriott. His hotel was spectacular. Overlooking the soccer arena and the whole city. When I got to the airport, three hours early, no air conditioning, tons of people, a bit crazy, my flight was delayed. When they finally loaded us on the airplane, they delayed another hour, then another half hour, then another 20 minutes. All in all I was supposed to arrive in London at 9 o’clock and have a nice relaxing night, but I ended up arriving at midnight and the only thing to order was chicken tikka masala. so there it was. Up early and headed to Heathrow. Just walked a few yards with Jason Kelce and his wife. Taylor Swift was in town last night for a big concert so now of course I’m on alert for all kinds of people. And back to 115 heat of Phoenix.

What started as a three week solo trip and adventure to Albania ended up being a two week trip with Caroline, a one week trip with Julie, and two nights with Andrew. Sometimes we learn the most about ourselves when our lifestyles unexpectedly change. Having to share spaces, choices, time, thoughts, and adventures was a fabulous experience. An opposite way of the way I live my daily life. I came home with zero dogs, a slight affinity for a few cats, and without my olive oils and jams…thanks Heathrow!

Until next year!

If you are reading this, I hope you enjoyed the ride!

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Homeward

Slowly,

Making my way back home. Left Paxos Island with Julie on a ferry in the morning after more yacht watching. It was fun to see all the people in the boats getting up and getting started for the day. Watching the yachts come and go, cleaning up from the night before, getting ready for the day. Then we hopped the ferry to Corfu. Where Julie caught a flight to Athens and I caught another ferry over to Saranda. Andrew met me at the ferry and we had lunch and then caught a bus to Tirana. The bus ride was long and miserable for me. It was about 5 1/2 hours long with little air conditioning. There was a 30 minute stop where everyone piled off the bus to use the bathrooms and then got in the buffet line at the gas station and had chicken and rice full dinners. Andrew and I just stood in the air conditioning and watched people eat food as fast as they could. We then had to get in a taxi for about 40 minutes to get back to the hotel. Staying at the same hotel I did originally. Love it here. The city has transformed from when I was here three weeks ago to a massive soccer stadium. The whole entire Square where the dictators armies marched, Italy’s armies marched, Germany’s armies marched has been converted into a turf field with a huge screen for everyone to watch the soccer games. There are food vendors everywhere and TVs in every bar and restaurant. The people in the Albanian costumes just sat like that for hours and hours yesterday not moving so that people could take photos of them in their costumes. It’s all pretty exciting to be a part of. we wandered around and were back at the hotel around 11. It is oppressively hot again and I fly out at 6:45 pm and head to London.

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CATS

Oh my God, the cats in this city. In this country. Cats are like pigeons. Cats are like rats. Cats are everywhere. And they all seem to have one bad eye or one bad ear. Cats outside the fish market waiting for sardines, we have six cats that are living on our patio. We have a cat that as soon as I open the front door ran into the house. Cats, cats, cats, cats, cats. I miss my dogs.

BUS PEOPLE. We are bus people. We had a great breakfast of yogurt, honey and fruit, and then caught the bus all the way to the top of the island to the village of Lukka. We then started walking beach to beach to beach to beach and eventually walked the entire way back to our little village of Gaios. We arrived home at 7 PM. We left at 10:30 AM.

Beaches named by us included, hidden Beach, goat beach, smoothie beach, pod beach, popular beach, and that may be all. We had our normal lunch of Greek salad and tzatziki. As we were walking back, we came across this tiny, tiny village town along the road. We decided to stop and have a beer since it is our last day together. We ordered the Greek Alpha beer and thensaw the menu. This restaurant has been family owned since 1888. so cool to see the menu with the family picture on the front. And the recipes all are grandma’s traditional recipes.

We got back into town just in time to see this enormous yacht backing into a parking spot. We watched it dock and all the ropes and such being attached and winched on. After dinner, we walked back in the dark to see what was happening. The yacht was all lit up, but there was no action happening. This is after we were told today that Nicole Kidman and her family came last summer to goat beach. So we were sure we were seeing nichole Kidman‘s yacht:. But I asked Siri who owned the serenity yacht and it is a Saudi oil tycoon. And now we’ve been googling his family, his children, etc. The yacht cost $50 million and cost $5 million to run. It was quite incredible. And it’s also incredible to see how fast we can find out information on anything these days.

Caroline is missed as I made an observance in Albania about how I didn’t think the medical care was up to United States standards. When I was trying to describe it to Julie, I said Caroline can you explain what it’s like and she said “it’s like Florence Nightingale is bandaging soldiers in World War I“ And ever since then we laugh every time we see someone with a cast tied on with a gauze strip around their neck.

Our time is quickly coming to an end, we have watched three soccer games, had delicious meals, and tonight we are topping it off with shots of Ouzo, watching Italy versus Spain.

Life is good as I make my way back to Albania with a gigantic heat rash tomorrow.

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So many cats!

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BEACH BUMS

The heat wave has definitely hit Albania and Greece. Basically we’ve spent the last two days walking and finding beaches to swim in. I’ve never vacationed and swam at the beaches like this. We walk, see a beach or people swimming and we hike down to it and swim. Every beach we go to we name it ourselves. So we have swam in AA beach(there was a photo in my post yesterday of a group of people sitting in a circle outside. We don’t know what they were doing so we assumed it was an AA meeting. Right across the wall from them was the AA beach., yacht beach, City Beach, and elevator beach in Corfu. And today…. Fish restaurant Beach, motorcycle beach, THE beach, and we chose not to swim in Statue beach. Looking at the photos, I bet you can picture which one was statue beach.

Not only did we turn into beach bums. We also became bus people in Corfu. We took the bus into the old town many times. And walked to various places. Yesterday was just a long day of busing, walking and beaching. We had a fabulous dinner overlooking the ocean about a mile away from our hotel. And even bought wine to take home. Which they gave to us in plastic water bottles. Spiro, who is the owner of the hotel, we like to imagine that he loves us, had his son come over to help with the visa machine at about 10:30 last night. We all chatted and laughed for quite a while. Julie seems to think that his son is the perfect man for me. Sorry, no photos. But there is a photo of us with Spiro.

Today began with ferry madness. We already had our fairy tickets in hand, so it was supposed to be an easy trip. Spiro had his cousin drive the taxi for us down to the port. His cousin directed us inside the ferry terminal and we headed towards the cruise line door. The cruise line people directed us out of the building and around to the left. At that point, the zipper on my suitcase broke and my shit was all over the street. We picked that up fixed the zipper and headed in the door to the left. They told us no you need to go down to the end of the fence and go around and come back, we did that, now it is about 90° out, when we got back, they said oh no you’re not going to Albania? You need to go all the way down to the other end of the port. This should be about a 15 minute walk. Julie took off at a dead sprint even though we had 40 minutes to catch the ferry. We stopped at every boat nope nope nope nope and true to form, our ferry was the very last ferry or the very first ferry in the port. We got to it with about 10 minutes to spare. Also, because we left so early we did not have any water with us and we had not had any food in our stomach yet for the day. We were planning to do that with all the extra time we were going to have at the port

The trip over to the island of Paxos was easy. And we got off and immediately said whatever the first café we come to we will stop and get something to snack on. We stopped in this beautiful little bar that only offered chocolate croissants or ham and turkey Panini. So we split a Wonderbread Panini and I had a coffee. Then we could watch the boats come in and out of the port. It was like a canal in Venice. Greatest boat watching ever. Then it was time to find our home on Booking.com. The owner had messaged us that we just needed to go to the square and this was the only house with a red door. There are no addresses on this island. Oh my God, it must’ve taken us 45 minutes to find the house with the red door. Because the photos and the description do not match the house with the red door. We asked about six or seven different shopkeepers to help us find this house. Finally, I was asking a guy on a motorcycle, and we both looked up and stared and right in front of us was a big red door. we are staying in a traditional house. It is almost 300 years old. If it were museum, it would be really cool to visit. But we are sleeping here for two nights. The towels are packed in mothballs, the furniture is all covered with. I don’t know…covers. It’s a bit musty. But on the positive side there’s lots of space. We opened the windows to air it out. There’s air conditioning upstairs where the three bedrooms are. We’re in Greece on an island with turquoise blue waters.

We unpacked and went down and had our Greek salad and Taziki for lunch and then started walking towards beaches. We basically would walk for about 20 to 30 minutes. Find a beach walk down to it swim come up and continue the process until we got to the beach that was on the map. We stayed there for probably two hours because we found a shady rock to lay on Swim dry off swim dry off. It was fantastic.

We walked back and the second half of the Albania Croatia soccer game was on. We thought we’d sit down and have a beer and we were the only girls in a crowd of men watching the game. It was exciting and a last-minute goal by Albania tied the score 2/2. It’s time to go back wash off all the salt water and find a place for dinner. This town is absolutely adorable. Lots of restaurants, cafés, little shops, boats people, etc. It’s not as touristy as other islands yet because cruise ships can’t dock here.

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The next post explains this day pretty much. I didn’t realize I had not posted. The only thing to add is that we stumbled upon a wedding, see photos, but we also stumbled upon a Greek orthodox funeral. We watched as this huge line of people walked up to the casket, and each person stopped and kissed the corpse on the lips. Interesting. The first photo is a view of the airplane bridge that we would stand on and watch the airplanes come and go. And also the artists we met near the ferry terminal. This potter and his wife were wonderful. I miss my dogs, stray, cats everywhere.

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Glass elevator from the beach and yacht central 

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Different travels

My adventures with Julie are much different than my adventures with Caroline. We hopped the ferry yesterday morning after a good breakfast at the hotel and had a two hour ride over to Corfu Greece. We are loving Corfu! Our hotel is actually in an outskirt town called Perama. Which is about a 4 1/2 mile walk into old town Corfu. Of course we walked it. We did a lot of people watching yesterday, we found an area where all the money yachts are docked, and we went down onto the pier and watched them park the yachts and looked for famous people and looked in windows and just basically nosed around. We found all kinds of different beaches and watched people swim around. For us that is tomorrow. Then we walked along the coastline into town …more people watching… winding through all the narrow streets and homes of Corfu was an adventure in itself. The old town district is fantastic. Tons of restaurants and shops and people and noise and rich people to watch and dogs on leashes and ice cream, everything you would expect in a Greek town. We ended up having dinner at about 10 o’clock last night. It was a delicious dinner and we debated whether to walk the 4 miles back but decided to take the city bus back to the top of the hill and walked only about a mile and a half back. Think we were in bed around 1 AM. Long day. Fun day. Pictures should show you a great deal about Corfu. Today we have another similar day ahead. Can’t wait to head into town.

As Andrew warned us, it took us 45 minutes or more to get through immigration when we got to Greece. It seems they were letting Australian and Americans like us through easily, but everyone else took an inordinate amount of time. I think they were probably checking for people who were trying to Illegally stay in Greece. But it took forever! There was a family of four from Kiev in front of us and although they got through immigration after about five minutes, they were pulled into a side room and were sitting waiting when we left.

I felt like I found famous people when our fairy pulled into the dock and we saw the splendor of the seas! The cruise ship that is going around the world. I follow many of the TikTokers who are documenting this nine month voyage so I was so excited to see the ship.

One beach, we found had a clear glass elevator from the beach up to the road. So of course we had to ride the elevator. It was almost straight up a Cliffside and it held at the most four people, but Julie and I did it just the two of us. Make sure to watch the video.

We are at the Argo hotel. The host name is Spiro. We think maybe his wife has died and he’s trying to run it on his own. It’s fine for us. But breakfast was bread, butter, a Panini Nescafé, coffee, and a piece of lemon cake. Also a hard boiled egg that Julie did not want to eat, but I did. He is a sweet man and you can tell. He’s trying his best to keep his life afloat.

One cool area about a mile away from us at the bottom of the hill is the end of the airport. There is a narrow cement bridge type walkway that people go out and wait for hours as planes come in and out taking pictures and videoing them. That is our bridge to get into old Corfu. But we stopped there for probably 30 minutes watching planes come and go. It’s unbelievable how close they are. Very cool.

Be sure to note the picture of the night version of the airport. We were walking back at midnight and planes were still coming and going. But you can also see a little rowboat in the foreground.

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Nighttime and early morning

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Old town, Corfu, and people watching