Reminiscence by Juliet:
We flew back to the UK via a few days in Greece where we hired a Fiat 106 which turned out to be a rather small car for 3 long-legged girls and a vast quantity of luggage including such random things as a hockey stick ! No such thing as air con either and, even though we were used to African heat, we found it fiercely hot and hard to endure driving around sitting on hot, sticky seats ! The highlight for me was climbing up to the hilltop fort at Nafplion.
Reminiscence by Judy:
As far as the Athens stopover went I can remember more difficulties than pleasures e.g getting a puncture on the main road out of Athens at rush hour and having to unload all our vast amount of stuff onto the road to get at the spare at the same time as trying to keep you 3 safe from the traffic speeding past – there was no hard shoulder. Then we were too late to find a campsite and ended up pitching our tent beside the road (a much smaller one) in the dark; also eating gritty bread and drinking hot ouzo on our campsite at the beach and touring various ruins in boiling hot sun with grumpy children (probably Fiona, appreciation of ancient archeological sites with temperatures in the 90’s was a bit much to ask of her). I expect it was just the wrong time for me after all the effort and stress of leaving Alliance. I was probably tired out.
Reminiscence by Graham:
When booking our flight back to England we chose to have a stopover in Greece because we liked the idea of an interlude before going home to a completely different lifestyle. Anyway, Greece is a fascinating place and we didn’t expect to ever have a family holiday there. We had a huge amount of baggage allowance so we took our tent with us. When we arrived in Athens we went to hire a small Fiat car which had a roof rack added for carrying half of the luggage, then we found a hotel for the night. Next morning after some shopping we headed out of the city to the Peloponnese, crossing the bridge over the impressive ancient Corinth Canal and then visiting the remains of the stadium at Olympia. We had expected Greece to be a bit cooler than Kenya but we soon found it was quite a lot warmer. We had a wander around some of the Bronze Age city ruins of Mycenae and admired the hilly scenery of the countryside which was amazingly green compared with most of Kenya. In the evening we couldn’t find a campsite and it was already dark when we settled for pitching our tent beside the road. Only a few cars passed us in the night and we slept well. We went to the busy port of Nafplion where we found a dusty crowded campsite. Despite the enervating heat we all climbed up the hillside to an old fort which had commanding views of the approaches to the
port. In the evening, which was light for much longer than we were used to, we had a cafe meal. Next day on our way to the beach we were pleasantly surprised to see a big pile of rucksacks abandoned on the pavement and we assumed that the owners were young travellers who knew they could safely leave them without a guard. The sea was lovely and warm but the beach had stones instead of the lovely almost white sand of Kenya beaches, so we were finding some things better and some things worse about returning to Europe. This was a lovely leisurely holiday after the chaos of packing and leaving our Kenya home. Back in Athens we made the expected visit to the Acropolis during the daytime and again after nightfall but we couldn’t bring ourselves to pay the price for tickets to the Son et Lumiere that evening so we walked on past it. Crowds of white people were a novelty and when we made our eventual return to Bristol it seemed a very strange and interesting place. I think we benefited from that interlude in Greece.
Juliet's Kenya Days blog 