Goodbye Peloponnese, Hello Corfu

Oct 8

 
We were up at 6:45 am to pack up, load the car, and grab breakfast at “our” place on Syntagma Square, which opened at 7:30. We wanted to get an early start to catch our flight from Athens to Corfu at 1:10, only a two hour drive away, but we needed to allow for glitches with traffic and turning in the car.

Our rattle-trap Peugot, parked at Mycenae. Bigger than we'd wanted, but peppy enough

We ordered our regular vegetable omelettes, and even though we pointed to the item on the menu, the server somehow got it wrong, and we got omelettes that we more meat than egg. Disappointing for our last Peloponnese meal.

Not my idea of a great breakfast.

Driving was mostly smooth sailing, beautiful highways with toll booths popping up seemingly randomly. I think we went through five of those in all today. There was a traffic slow-down on the peripheral road around Athens, but nothing we needed to panic about. As for turning in the car, it was a breeze, as promised. The company we used, Swift, does not have a car-return spot at the airport, but rather sends a driver to meet us at the departure area. We pulled up, he arrived within ten minutes, and that was it. Highly recommended!

The Athens airport was a zoo, but manageable. Our flight was just an hour long. We landed in Corfu in threatening weather. Caught a cab that took forever on a parking lot of a route to our hotel. What struck us as we wound our way through town was how run down it seemed. The towns we've been in so far have been very well kept, but Corfu needs a face lift. You'd think there would be enough funding considering the thousands of tourists that hop off their cruise ships every day.

 

The Palace of St Michael and St George, sadly run down

Probably apartments. Most building in old Corfu Town looked like this.

Once checked in to our hotel room-for-four for the night, we wandered a bit in Old Corfu Town, much of which is like an Arabic medina, stall after stall of (in this case) tourist stuff on narrow twisting lanes. Crowds of people, most of whom were probably off the six or so huge cruise ships moored in the harbour. We stopped in at a restaurant off the noisy main streets and had a small meal of calamari and tzatziki.

Old Town is a network of tourist streets like this

One of some six cruise ships that left harbour in the evening, to be replaced by six more. The ferry is heading to Albania.

Back at the hotel, we waited for our Scottish friends, Gill and Frances, to arrive. We met Gill on our Croatia boat-and-bike trip last year. When Carol put the word out that we’d be doing this trip, Gill jumped right on it, and her biking friend Frances was all in. 

It was close to 10 pm when they finally arrived, and we all went out for dinner at a quiet Italian place, outdoors but under cover as a thunderstorm rolled in, bringing torrents of rain. We lingered until close to midnight, when the rain eased, then made our way back to the City Marina Hotel.

Gill had sent us a photo of the two of them in the Edinburgh airport, and they looked so fully glamorous, we thought we'd look like, I dunno, their pet dogs or something beside them. Turns out Gill is very into AI "improvements" in photos, and we were quite relieved when they turned up, looking like normal people. Here's us at dinner (not really!):

If you look closely, I have two right hands, one on the glass and one at my cheek. 

This hotel. This is the first one I really have anything to complain about — it’s a dump. The lobby is spiffy, completely misleading. The room we booked is a ‘family room,” actually two rooms with two narrow beds in each, and are basically acceptable. One room has a balcony overlooking the port, so no complaints there. But well, the bathroom was in need of a complete overhaul, with flaking chrome and mould and a stained tub, a hand-held shower (that fortunately worked well and provided plenty of hot water). There were long dark hairs in the sink from a previous guest and though the toilet had a label wrapped around the lid saying it was sanitized, the seat had some suspicious stains on it. The towels smelled like they’d been used too many times between washings. The flusher on the wall had a half-flush button that didn’t work, but the full-flush one did, thank goodness. The real kicker in this place was that when we came back from dinner and were approaching the elevator, a large rat ran under our feet and headed down some stairs. When we shrieked (I learned I can shriek!) the guy at the desk shushed us. Not sure he understood that a rat had just run by. I suppose the thing was escaping the storm. I was glad our room was three storeys up.