well i’m on my way…

When we woke up our first morning there, I threw open the windows; first by turning the knob on the glass panes and then unhinging the blue clasp from the window to open the shutters.  Mediterranean sunlight poured in to greet us with the oh-so-typical whitewashed buildings contrasted against the bright blue sky.  We’re in Greece!

We rented the ATV from the hotel owner’s son, a tall, dark, and blue eyed handsome man-not to mention super friendly!  As we drove around for the next few days, we fell in love with the scenery and the people.  The fragmented mountains in the middle of the island seemed to loom over us everywhere we went.  The sea was almost always visible, except for when we were driving down roads Meg thought we shouldn’t have, which in hindsight, we couldn’t, since the ATV didn’t quite have the power needed to chug up the steep roads.  We sang togethere “I think I can I think I can” many times during those happy hours we spent driving around.  The stone white buildings dotted the grape vineyard landscape as far as we could see, that is, until the sea began.

On our way back from Oia the first night, it was dark, and Meghan, being the lead-footed driver she is, was pushing the ATV to its limit at around 50 kilometers an hour.  We saw a stopsign up ahead, but recalled during our daylight hours of driving around that stopsigns appeared about 30 feet (10 meters?) before intersections.  Meg somehow didn’t remember this, or didn’t see the sharp turn up ahead to our right…As the headlights illuminated the sign pointing us towards our destination of Perissa, Meghan suddenly turned the ATV with so much force that we took the corner on two wheels.  “JESUS MEGHAN!” was the only thing that emitted from my mouth, much to my younger sister’s entertainment.  We didn’t even stop, and I couldn’t be mad, because all I could hear over the roar of the engine was my sister’s laugh.  And anyone who has a sister knows that when she’s laughing, all you can do is laugh with her. 

Our dinner at God’s Garden was amazing.  For some reason I haven’t been able to recall a lot of the places we’ve been or where we’re going (I keep on confusing Olympia-the place where the first Olympics were held with Olympus…the mountain) so I called this restaurant “The God Place”.  Before we even ordered our food, a cat joined us begging for our nonexistant dinner.  Meghan ordered chicken souvlaki-grilled chicken (half of which went to the cat), tomato, onion, tzatziki (sp?) sauce, and fries wrapped up in a pita.  Yep, the fries were wrapped up in there too!  I ordered stuffed tomato and pepper…they were stuffed with rice and some unidentifyable yet delicious spices.  Accompanying the tomato and pepper were roasted potatoes drenched in butter.  After we paid, the waitress brought us out a dessert of fried dough balls in a sugary cinammon syrup.  Yum! 

Let me tell you about John, the hotel owner of Katerina and John.  He was so cute!  He was a heavy set working class looking man, with unkempt hair, and paint stained clothes.  His smile never escaped his lips.  His skin was beautifully weathered from the sun and his eyes were so blue you knew instantly his son inherited them from him.  The first day we tried to leave the island, we asked him if he could take us to the port.  He replied “Yes.  Eleven…I go to port”.  I asked him when we needed to be out of the room, and his reply was a sheepish grin and and drawn out “Eeeeleven”.  At ten past eleven, he showed up, looking a bit flustered at his watch, and told us “Thee uh, boat, no is come.”  We made him repeat it, not because we didn’t understand him, but because it sounded so cute.  He spoke rapidly to his son in Greek (which kind of sounds like an incomprehensible Spanish, which both my sister and I can speak on a basic level) and he explained to us that the weather was too bad for the boat to come.  It was windy that day, but we learned days later that the boat didn’t come because they hadn’t sold enough to fill the boat.

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