OK, a lot has happened since my last post. My actual birthday in Paleo on Tuesday, after our wonderful dinner, was very quiet. The weather was cool and stormy and we stayed "home" most of the day, venturing out really only for lunch at Dolphin, just up the road, and for dinner again at Limani, down by Alipa beach by our place.
Wednesday was a travel day, as we took the bus(es) to the airport in the morning and caught our 2pm (supposedly) flight to Kefalonia (or Cephalonia), another Greek island further south in the Ionian Sea. The flight ended up being about 45 minutes late, with absolutely no communication from the airline at the airport, which is apparently pretty typical of the little airlines around here, but we got there OK and picked up our rental car for the 50 minute drive to Sami, on the northeast coast of the island, just across from Ithaca. And, thanks to Carol's help with Google maps, I didn't make any wrong turns! It was a bit of a challenge trying to communicate with the rental car company and our host at Sea Salt Apartments, where we are staying, when we don't have roaming on our cellphones and can only use WiFi, but we got into our lovely apartment just after 6pm and headed out for a great dinner at a taverna, Deco, just around the corner from our place, on the waterfront. Sami is a very picturesque little seaside town, with an active ferry port and a main street that is packed with lots of restaurants overlooking the glassy-calm waters and the marina, and the weather when we arrived was picture-perfect.
Thursday, when we got up, the weather was more overcast, but we got up and wandered up and down the "main drag" of Sami and then headed along Sami Beach, a very long and pretty pebble beach that runs between Sami and Karavomylos, the next town up the coast, about 1km away. Karavomylos, though much smaller than Sami, has a lot more hotels and seems to cater to the British package holiday crowd, but has a pretty church and the very picturesque Lake Karavomylos, which is really a little pond just off the ocean. We stopped at a taverna there for a drink and watched, and listened to the thunder, as the weather started to roll in over the sea and hiked quickly back along the beach road towards Sami. We managed to make it back before the skies really opened up and ducked into Deco again, which happened to be the first taverna that we came to that had interior seating. We had a tasty cheese pie and smoked salmon bruschetta for lunch and waited for the storm to pass before heading home for a nap. And now the weather is perfect again.
2025-02-18