THE BEACHES OF PAROS

Saturday, November 17^th, 2007 Driving the coastal beaches…..

Jim has decided that I should spend a day in bed. He keeps bring me coffee, hot lemon juice with honey, and breakfast in bed. Wow, am I going to be spoiled. But I do hope this helps the body mend as I am still having troubles with the cold. It’s rather nice as I sit here in bed and type as I can look out the window and see Naxos across the water. Jim has gone to the store for more Kleenex and coffee before heading over to the well for more water. The weather is clear, some clouds on the horizon but contrary to what the weather reports on the Internet said yesterday; it doesn’t look like its going to rain.

Well, my bed rest lasted until about 1 pm and then I just couldn’t stay down any longer. But I do feel better; I think that the extra liquids have helped me as I don’t drink a lot during the day because of the problems of finding the W.C. on a regular basis when we’re out traipsing around the countryside. After Jim fixed us lunch we did some laundry and then headed for a drive to see if the Internet “hot spot” he found during his morning drive was a secured or open spot. On our way to the main road we clocked the distance from the Villa to the road and it’s a distance of 1.3 kilometers; not too far and it’s all downhill but then there’s the walk back up afterwards.

Down by our local beach we found a pole with five different DSL boxes along with several satellite dishes. I fired up the laptop and it spotted the servers but all of them were secured so that ended that possibility. We did stop to watch several young men who were wind sailing on Golden Beach. Using a large comma shaped “kite” it was amazing to watch them use the wind to basically water ski as though they were being pulled by a fast speedboat. The weather is beautiful today but they were wearing wetsuits as I’m sure it was cold out there in the water.

We continued to drive along the coast until the road brought us back to the highway and then we took the next road back to the coast and a very pretty little town called Piso Livadi. The protected harbor held many little fishing boats and piles of large nets were drying along the docks. As we were leaving we pulled over to let two vehicles go around us; Jim does this because he hates “tail gating”; but, that’s just the way the Greeks drive so he’s always pulling over. The second vehicle stopped and backed up after passing us; it was Aristo, the gentlemen who takes care of our Villa and had helped us when we first arrived. It’s a small world, even on “our” island.

Our next adventure today was, you guessed it, back to Naousa and the Internet. But, we drove a completely different route to Marpissa and headed for Kostos in the hills for another route into Naousa. Jim is determined to drive as many back roads as possible while we’re here. On this one we found another stretch of the Byzantine Route with a Byzantine Bridge for a Kodak moment. The weather is becoming overcast so that storm may arrive tomorrow; but for now, we were able to sign on, get our emails and do some research on the ferry boat routes for next week. Arrived back at the house just at dusk and had another home cooked meal. Jim gets very frustrated driving at dusk as they generally don’t turn their headlights on until it is totally dark; some do use the small running lights and that help a little bit.