When I went to Greece last time out of season, I took one tightly packed suitcase and one wheely bag with my big leather handbag on top. I largely took summer clothes with a few cardigans and I wore my coat and scarf, it being February in the UK.
18th February 2010, in fact.
Steve’s birthday.
We were seriously NOT talking at that time.
He’d moved out in the July the year before, on my request after a particularly gruelling trip to my therapist but I always suspected afterwards it may just have been serious PMT. I regretted it immediately but he was glad to go, we were fighting a lot. He was only around the corner so he could carry on spending time with Phoebe and Nelson, but it felt like a lifetime away.
I arrived in Greece, heartbroken, having lost Steve, my house, my car, even my wonderful kids had gone to live with their Dad while I tried to pull things together.
I cried my way to Greece and then, having left my new iPhone on the plane seat, I cried even harder for most of the coach journey from Athens to Kalamata, heaven only knows what my fellow passengers thought.
So, in retrospect, I was pretty ill equipped for the changeable weather of February but I don’t remember it being THAT cold. My friend Elias put me in a lovely but rather bare house, usually let out in summer. I did have a fireplace and Elias kindly delivered logs so I remember a few cozy fires in the evenings.
But I’ve just been reading a book called “100 Days Of Solitude” by Daphne Kapsali (excellent, highly recommended!) and she was on the same longitude as Stoupa (had to look that one up!) and while December was changeable, cold one day and warmish the next, apparently January is seriously grim and you can see snow in February.
However, nothing could be colder than that awful apartment we stayed one night in, at Easter in Malta last year, 2015.
I originally wrote “a couple of years ago”.
Only last year?
Really? Seriously?
That is sobering. It seems like a lifetime ago. What a terrible, wonderful, terrible year it has been, for sure.
Sarah and I went for an old mate’s Easter wedding, three days in we were both dying of nicotine poisoning due to the insistence of everyone of smoking incessantly inside. Then a sudden spring storm with howling wind and lashings of rain made us even more miserable.
I’ve never been so cold, sick, uncomfortable and miserable in my life. We hunted for an AirBAndB.com but nothing was to be had for love nor money. We just had to go home!
However, I was glad to get there as by then, Steve was showing some signs of not being very well at all. I was worried sick about him and rightly so as it turned out.
So I’m thinking now perhaps two suitcases, to allow for cardis, although that will cost an extra £21 and four suitcases in total will be harder to get in the taxi picking us up from the airport. Three people, four suitcases, hmmmm. Depends on the taxi size.
Perhaps Sarah and I could share the extra one?
She doesn’t have many clothes but she wants to take her juicer!
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