Sunday is Reunion and all of the Cheese.
Just when you think your bags are crammed as full of stuff as they can possibly be, it turns out you have room for 20 one pint canning jars with lids.
You may have read on this blog before that Richie and Lisa (Lou Lou) live on a Quinta - a self-sustaining farm - in Portugal. I had the great and fantastic fortune to visit them on their lovely plot of land with my family earlier this summer. They have built a life there, with solar power and gravity fed water from a spring deep in the ground. They have gardens and chickens and pigs and an outdoor kitchen and it is a wonderful place to spend time and feel close to the good Earth. Just a few weeks after we left the quinta, a fire tore through their valley.Thankfully, their house survived, along with the chickens and their car. Sadly, they lost one pig and all of their tools, including Lisa’s collection of canning jars she has acquired over their 4 years there. In a heart swelling gesture reflecting the tremendous love and admiration Richie and Lou Lou have cultivated with our SwimVacation family, some of our most recent guests sent along donations so that they could begin to resupply themselves with the tools required to live off the land. I often bring small items they can’t acquire in Portugal to pass to them on a trip, and when I asked this time, Lisa said she needed jars. And so, in and among the heaps of gear we travel with, I found nooks and crannies enough for 20 of them.
Of course the jars added an extra dimension to the ceremonial lugging of the gear on Saturday, when Simon and I move all of the bags and coolers and gear and stuff and more stuff and jars from our land accommodations to our boat, while Richie and Lisa buy all of the food in Sporades to provision the yacht and her passengers for a week. All in a day’s work with people that we love who are worth 20 glass jars and more.
These are the kinds of bonds you build when you work with the best of the best on boats. These are the kinds of people I have been so lucky to add to my life, my family.
Speaking of friends like family….
Our guests are here!
Fun fact about this week’s swimmers: In 2019, one couple and 3 solo travelers all arrived in Lefkada in the Ionian Sea to join SwimVacation. They had each traveled with us before, but they were strangers to each other.
That lasted about 5 minutes.
Jeff and Amy, Heidi, Kendra and Natalie became fast friends, fast family. It was a very special week and they all vowed to travel together again. Fast forward to the announcement of our 2022 trips, and Kendra signed up for the Sporades trip (Again, as she had just done it in 2021!). She reached out to Jeff and Amy who quickly signed up. They reached out to Heidi who registered too. Natalie wanted to join but had another commitment (we miss you Natalie!), but Kendra added her sister, Dana, to complete the quintuplet.
And so, a group that met through SwimVacation have embarked on another SwimVacation together. It’s the kind of thing Hopper and I have dreamed of as we have slowly built this little company.
It’s great to see these folks again, and especially together.
Simon and I collected them at noon today and brought them to our little yacht, stuffed full of the things that will make a great week of swimming and sailing and eating and more eating and laughing and family and eating. Also eating.
There will be a lot of eating.
We quickly left the dock and made our way to the second major island in the Sporades archipelago, Skopelos. We stopped at a tiny side alcove off Panormos Bay (39.1059606, 23.6607474), where Simon swam two stern lines to shore and before I could even get myself sorted, these five were in the water. Hey! Wait up!
In crystal clear water that is perfectly warm, we took off for a 20 minute out and turn around swim that turned into an easy hour of exploring this beautiful coastline. Kendra spent most of it underwater as she usually does, Dana fit right in with the group who wanted to swim and gab and oooh and ahhh and revel in their Greek reunion. Oh! And a SwimVacation first: A cormorant SWAM right under Dana and I!! Twenty five feet below us, flappy flappy swift and swimmy this bird put us all to shame. Amazing! Photographer fail, no picture. After the swim we floated behind the boat for a while, unable to come up with a reason to get out of the water.
Until…cocktails appeared. Hello Sporades Sparkler! This is a secret ingredient cocktail that Lisa serves in each location, and includes a local ingredient - in this case, Metaxa. Metaxa is a Greek spirit created by a combination of Greek Island wines and Mediterranean botanicals. Yes please. And it paired perfectly with Lisa’s smoked salmon appies. Yum.
Pockets of easy conversation are happening fore and aft on our lovely little yacht, a floating home for our little family, reconnected after these few and strange years. I hear discussions of how everyone weathered lockdown (Dana was stuck in Mongolia for 6 months!), major life events - Amy closed her shop on her terms just weeks before the shut down, Jeff weathered the storm with adjustments to his office practice, Heidi gave birth to the world’s cutest baby only 6 months later, Kendra has moved and changed jobs for the better. Old friends picking up right where they left off. Sparklers and salmon in hand.
Did I mention the eating?
Speaking of, dinner calls. I hear it’s souvlaki. Saganaki souvlaki. That’s delicious Greek cheese. On a stick, with other delicious things. Quite an opener, Lou Lou. Dessert was a plate of fantastic cheeses and biscuits. Thank you, Greece, for all of the cheese.
It’s good to be back to Greece and these Sporades Islands. We will be in and out of the many cracks and crevices that texture their rocky coasts, silver and special, lined with memories to be made.
Wanna see where we are tonight? Here’s our location:
And here’s just a little video from today. Much more to come.
Kali Nikta from Cheese I mean Greece.
Heather