13/9 Claire – Travelling to Kefalonia

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Originally uploaded by blenkers

After a tearful farewell I have had to leave Ian at the airport. Spending 8 weeks with someone night and day will do two things to a couple, it will either drive you insane or closer together and for us it was later. To suddenly say goodvye for 3 weeks, which is two weeks longer than we have been apart before, was a little more than my jet lagged, sleep deprived, hormonal mind could handle today.

Mog and Jackie are here looking after me so first stop was the new champagne bar in Newcastle airport for a glass to celebrate the next weeks holiday. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to help them with the bottle of champagne on the plane, these guys have style, as I have a car at the other end. I will somehow make up for this by buying fizz in the supermarket at stocking the villa fridge.

When I picked up the hire car it was already dark in Kefalonia and 2hours in front of the UK. The car hire company have advised me to travel at 20kph as it has been raining and the roads of very slippery. I didn’t really appreciate why his conservatism was important until I saw that he was really talking about the roads in the close vicinity to the airport and that these roads are about 45 degrees. The little car I have is a front wheel drive Hyundai and with the adults and the pieces of luggage this was going to be tricky. Most of the 38km drive was windy 30km roads, this was the first country of my whole holiday that is drives on the right, and it was raining again. To say this was a challenging drive for me was an understatement. I am looking forward to seeing the island in the daylight as I know this will be a completely different story. The villa details have warned us that the driveway to the villa is very steep and the advice given was to turn off the air con in the car to give the car more power (?) or if the car is laden with passengers and luggage you should kick out the passengers at the bottom, drive the luggage to the top, unload it, drive back down for the passengers (where ARE we staying??) which I have found comedy… until we arrived in the middle of a thunderstorm and found the car couldn’t get up the drive with or without Mog and Jacks in it. In fact after both myself and Mog trying and failing to get the front wheels to grip the steep drive, which was like a river of water also, so we dumped the car outside the gates and walked up with the cases.

So we get into the villa with the car abandoned smelly of burnt clutch, soaked to the skin and too late to really go out for any food… en vacance!!