It has been a long time since I wrote last. I am now in Tomb Bay, a bay with ancient tombs looking down on us from on top of a hill. I have done many cool things since I wrote last but I can’t fit them all, so I will just give the highlights.
Last time I posted we were still in Gaeta and now we are cruising again. We went fast down the western Italian coast and had to have a repair done in a small town call Vibbo Valencia. While we were stuck in Vibbo, we had a very fun time traveling by car down a third of the Italian coast through Sicily. While we were in Sicily we climbed Mt. Etna, an active volcano that had very recently erupted. You could still pick up hot lava rocks. We hiked around two different craters. After our auto pilot was fixed we kept flying down the Italian coast. We did an overnight passage and went out of our way to see one of the most spectacular things I have ever seen. We went to a little island called Stromboli, an active volcano that erupts just a little bit every 10 minutes or so. It is often referred to as the natural light house. In the olden days sailors would know where they were when the saw Stromboli.
When we were in Vibbo we started to make a hand made picture frame for my grandma’s 70th birthday and we spent a lot of time during this part of the trip working on it. After sailing around the toe, and along most of the foot of Italy, we stopped near the ball of the foot in a port called Crotone. We left our boat there and went to London for a week to give the frame to my grandma and celebrate her birthday. We then crossed from Crotone to Greece. Things are very different being in countries that speak little English. It’s especially tough in Greece and Turkey, where the alphabet isn’t even the same. When we go out for dinner and the waiter doesn’t speak English it is hard to communicate to him what you want. One of our highlights this trip was when Danny and my mom were out shopping. We were planning to have hot dogs and hamburgers for dinner so my mom got hamburger meat, or so she thought, because it was all in Greek. When she was at the cash register she noticed small letters on the back that were in English that said “for dogs and cats only”. We all had a pretty good laugh after that one.
I didn’t like Greece a lot. The water was still cold and the food was terrible compared to Italy. The good part was that my grandparents and aunt came to visit. It was windy during their visit, so we had to backtrack a bit to get out of the wind, but it was fun anyway. We wanted to get to Turkey as fast as we could without being totally rushed. We went to a place called Paros because we heard there was water skiing and wakeboarding and we met Dimitri, the very nice owner of the water sports place. I liked water skiing a ton and wakeboarding is even better because you can jump. We got to go wakeboarding and this weird thing called tubing (three of us at once) and that was as much fun as wakeboarding.
From there we over time got to Turkey on possibly our best day. It was our best day because we played on our newly rigged zip line, finished school, and I got to throw my grammar book overboard because I finished my assignments first. I was really really excited when I threw it over because I reached my goal, finished school and was done with my mother as my teacher.
We are still making very little miles, which means we don’t have to sail a lot and we spend our time just reading, swimming, and enjoying the endless sun. Since we got to Turkey it feels more like vacation than anything. I am bored sometimes, but that is kind of fun because you don’t always have something planned. My mom bugs me to do stuff, especially windsurfing because we’ve had it on our boat. I don’t like when she bugs me to get off my butt, but then I usually have fun because I’ve learned to windsurf. Now I wait for windy days to go out and its very fun.
It has been unbelievably hot and sometimes we sleep outside. We haven’t had rain for many days. I think there is going to be a drought. We are practically living in the water. It is unbelievably warm water.
Even though we have done all these cool things this year isn’t all fun and games as many of you probably think. I spend twenty four hours a day with my family and you can imagine how up tight things can get. We still also had to deal with school as well as many more chores than we had at home in Ladera. We can not hire a cleaning lady or anything because we are always moving. Now that Denise isn’t here, we have to do all of the shopping. We have learned to like shopping because we make a contest out of who can sneak the most candy and junk into the shopping cart without my mom noticing.
I am looking forward to going home and seeing all my friends, but I am also sad this trip is almost over. There is much to think about what with going home and everything. I am happy for this year and for the chance to experience this adventure.
I hope to write when I get home about what it feels like to be back.
