Happy birthday to me…

After the obligatory ‘roll out of bed and into the sea’ first thing in the morning, we headed out of the harbour and down the Meganisi channel, stopping halfway to row into a cave in the rocks for a look around and a swim for a while.  Back out into the channel and it was such an idyllic scene seeing all of the other yachts under sail that we just had to do the same.  Sails were unfurled, the motor was cut  and there were, sailing on the cool and bright clear water, as the Little River Band would say.  As the Little River Band did say, in fact, given that Cool Change was featuring heavily on the playlist at the time.  It was truly heavenly, and strangely both incredibly relaxing  and highly exhilarating at the same time.

We moored at Frikes, a lovely little village on the Ithaca coast, early afternoon and had plans to go exploring.  Plans that were well and truly scuppered after we bought several bottles of both blue and red vodka, and discovered that one of the girls on the boat moored beside us also had a birthday the next day, and was turning 21.  The music was cranked up, vodka was consumed and the next 12+ hours became a drunken blur.  We moved between the yacht, Penelope traverna (owned by a likable Greek guy named Stavros) and the Orange bar a  little further along the jetty.  Which I’m sure isn’t it’s real name, but it’s orange, and it’s a bar, so … yeah.  I think the fun finally stopped somewhere after 4am, by which time I was a year older, and considerably drunker, than I had been the day before.

I woke up again around 10.30 to receive my first present – a beautiful birthday hangover.  No time to worry about that though -  we’d arranged to hire scooters and go exploring round the island for the day.  After Stavros served us some much needed omelettes and juice for breakfast, the Group of Four headed for hills in a haze of blue smoke.  Blasting along on the scooters, ducking and weaving around the narrow winding roads high up on the cliffs of Ithaca, with sea meeting sky in two impossible shades of blue – well, if that’s not heaven, I suspect it’s pretty damn close.  First stop was  at Kathara Monastery followed by some quality beach time, which were both impressive, but like all good things in life it was more about the journey than the destination.  After filling up another good chunk of our camera’s memory cards, we rode back to the yacht for lunch and some general messing about.

Back on the scooters in the late afternoon to check out some Homeric ruins (specifically, Homer’s school) which was actually pretty cool for ‘a bunch of old rocks’, as Dean described them.  The off-road riding to get there and back was fairly interesting at times – lucky we’re all such skilled riders with such ideal cross country equipment eh?  After wandering round the ruins for half an hour or  so, we rode to a church on the top of the cliffs high above the ocean for some (more) spectacular views, then back to Frikes to drop off the scooters, have dinner and a couple of beers, and hit the sack before midnight for the first (and only) time in the Ionian.