Back in London--fall fun!

Today we took our rolling grocery cart out and ran some errands. Here are some of the resulting pictures.

Enjoy the rolling grocery cart because now it is no more. Jim popped a wheelie over the curb at Abbey Road and the cart's wheel flew off into the street. Here I am stylin with the cart prior to its death. RIP cart.



And reluctantly having my picture taken in a park near our house.


Finally Jim gave me the camera and we had a good time on Priory Road with me as director. Here is Jim doing some fall frolicking. By the end, we were laughing hysterically and people were crossing the road and looking at us out of the side of their eyes.

Jim on Priory Road


Jim in an intense grocery moment:


Jim running towards me in glee:


Jim loves going to the grocery store!


Weeeeee!!!!! It's AUTUMNAL!!!


I love having my picture taken:


Happy Laughing Jim (on our back steps):


Finchley at the window:

We love fall!

Rhodes Town

After saying goodbye to our friend Christina (the motherly looking woman on my left who got teary eyed when we said goodbye) and HOlly (the English singer who gave up her life and moved to Greece to be a singer), we headed to Rhodes Town, which is about an hour away from Lindos.


The first thing we did, was almost get run over while Jim posed above an ancient (and dry) moat and gazed with much fascination at some ancient cannonballs:

Fortunately, if we had been run over, it would have most likely been by a scooter or motor bike, so our chances were good.

Rhodes Town (at least OLD RHodes Town, which is the only part of Rhodes Town we visited) is much more ancient looking than Lindos was...and a lot bigger.


It also has a lot of stray dogs and cats. The cats weren't so healthy looking as the ones in Lindos. I'll spare the details, but we saw some pretty sad little cats. Here is Jim with the purple speckled dog (skin disease?) and some other dogs that we encountered around the city:






More pictures...some silly:





At the end of the day we packed into our rental car and headed to the airport..but, of course, we got hopelessly lost and there were many signs in Greek and I am a terrible navigator, so it was pretty stressful. Fortunately JIm has a good sense of direction so we finally made it...but because I'm sort of bad with military time, we were REALLY early (Jack would have been proud).

After the Acropolis

We decided we needed a change of scenery, so we drove South, past Kiotari (averting our eyes from the horror that was our previous hotel)to Plemi Beach. At first glance, it didn't look like a very nice beach because at the main parking area there was quite a bit of trash on the beach. But further down the beach we found a nice spot next to a wall where we settled down for the day. The beach was deserted when we arrived and the water was calm and clear. It was a pebble beach, so the sand was made up of tiny pebbles and the further out we went, the bigger the rocks got.

Jim heads to the beach:


Our camp for the day:


The beach:


pebble beach:



At the Fish restaurant:




And some more ruins (I tried to look enthusiastic for Jim's sake, but I didn't convince him):



Happy again on the beach!

Oh Yeah...the Acropolis

We didn't ride the donkeys, but walked up to the Acropolis on Friday morning. I'm sure I offended many by wearing my running shorts, but I was running low on clean clothes at that point, so hopefully the devout will forgive me.

Jim was much more into the Acropolis than I was, so the historical pieces are going to be non-existent in this account. I was too busy playing with some orange kittens.


Jim peeks over the side of the Acropolis:


ANd standing next to an ancient column:


And me, with the Agean Sea in the background, from the Acropolis:


On your way up to the Acropolis, Greek women lay out their wares (which raise suspicion because they all seem to have the exact same wares). As we walked past I said to Jim, "I wonder if they actually make these themselves or if they are made someplace else." And Jim said, "Yeah, they probably are mass produced in China." He didn't say it very loudly, but a Greek lady heard him and ran after us shaking her fist and yelling "All Greek Design! All Greek Design!!!" Stupid Americans.

Screw walking...we hit the beach

Ahhhhhhhh........the bay. We spent two full days just lying at this bay, where we could snorkle and saw lots of fish and someone supposedly saw a Moray Eel, but we didn't and we waved at people in the glass bottomed boats and got yelled at by fishermen for disturbing the fish and met the local beach animals and watched billy goats in the cliffs above and didn't get sunburned because we were diligently reapplying sunscreen.







It was perfect.


And then we went home and cooked Greek food, which we shared with our Polish neighbors because we cooked too much.




We also shared our dinner with this very pregnant cat, who seemed to live in our apartments, but wouldn't let us pet her.

The night before at another Greek Taverna, we shared our dinner with NINE cats, who were fighting each other and jumping up on the table and into our laps for food. ANd this was the scene at a fish restaurant a couple of days later. The cats in Greece know how to work it.

Day three a desert hike (or that's what it seemed like)

On our third day, we hopped in our rental car and headed to Archangelos, which is a less quaint town near Lindos that houses "The Seven Springs," man made irrigation springs. We had a book of walks, which took us from the town to the springs and back and, after some frappes and sandwiches in town, we hit the dirt.

We saw sheep, chickens, poverty and very dead, freshly dead, and in the process of dying goats along the way. We also saw some gigantic olive trees. And lots of rocks.






After a couple of hours, we finally made it to the seven springs, which were a little less impressive than we had been led to believe they would be. But there was a very narrow and dark tunnel, which we could walk through, which lead to the man made lake (dubbed beautiful in our book, but, in reality, full of trash and covered in a brownish slime). I wasn't very keen on walking through the dark and narrow tunnel, but Jim guilt tripped me into it:



A mid-tunnel escape route:

After the exciting springs, we hiked up and across more desert-like land and heard some gun shots soon after we heard a farmer calling his goats (more dead goats, I'm afraid). Then we walked through a pack of boys playing soccer to their cries of "Allo! Allo! Allo!" and "You like the scorpion!! You like the scorpion!!" (sassy little boys.) Frankly, it was a relief to get back to the car a little dustier and more solemn then when we first got there. We also had formed the opinion that the people who wrote the walk book were slightly wearing rose tinted glasses during the writing of the book. But it was fun and educational, if not as scenic and breathtaking as our English walks are.