On the Way

 

 

On the Way

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Takis is a very optimistic person, more so than me, and he is convinced that we can keep travelling to the other side of the world for half the year. I’m not so sure.

But though I’m often reluctant, travel to Europe can be exciting. We do enjoy our stopovers – which I might add are quite necessary seeing that the journey from our Australian door to our Greek door usually takes 35 hours plus. Increasingly I have discovered that the stopovers, on the way there or on the way back, have become my real holiday. Firstly these stops, though short stays, give us time to recover some sleep and walk our tired limbs into life again, and secondly in these hotels I don’t have to clean the bathrooms or make the beds!

Singapore

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the early years we took our stopovers in Singapore, as we were travelling on Singapore Airlines. I've enjoyed the neat organized city centre and the city's glorious orchid gardens.

 

 

Athens

View from our hotel room

 

More recently we try to travel straight through to Athens, and then take a rest in that city before travelling onto the island. A stopover here gives Takis and chance to catch up with his Greek family and old school friends.

 

England

Somerset and Bath

The class of '55

On a couple of occasions we have made a stopover in London, and here it is me that takes the opportunity to visit relatives and old school friends.

 

 

 

Arriving in London

Arriving at Heathrow Airport, and then taking the Heathrow Express one feels like entering a worm-tunnel through the universe; people all around you are talking all kinds of languages, wearing all kinds of gear, and carrying packages of all kinds of shapes and sizes. My poem says it all!

After a journey through London, using the underground to Charing Cross, we haul our suitcases along platforms, balance them down escalators, and drag them up flights of stairs. Though inevitably even this part of the journey is enlivened by encounters with cheerful locals; a helpful Indian ticket seller, an Albanian store holder - who pointed the way up the street to the next station, a Polish bus conductor - who encourages us to take his tour of the city, all speaking good London-English.

 

 

Highspeed trains

Travel cards, zones and underground stations,
Platform one if you’re going to Hastings.
Cases lugged through tunnels, up stairs;
On board conductor checks our fares.
Stations flash past on the Southeastern -
Later we’ll go on the First Great Western.
Canterbury, Wye, Tunbridge and Seven Oaks;
‘Please mind the gap when exiting folks.’
Reading, Didcot, Swindon and Bath;
Alongside a river and a forest path.
Whoosh, whiz, joggle, zip and bump,
Past factory outlets and a city dump.
Metro readers search for glasses,
Trolly dispensing coffee passes.
Fiona phones re’ a broken mower.
While leaving behind a life that is slower
City gents talk stock and trips to the Haig.
Success in fast lane, they think they’re made!
Time and houses flashing past,
These super trains carry busy folks fast.

Julia Catton

My visits to family and school friends usually take us out of London and provide glimpses of English countryside.

 

In Kent for my aunt's golden wedding aniversary

Canterbury, Kent, 2010

I find the scenery in Kent and Sussex very familiar, and on the high-speed train to Hastings I sit back for an hour or so and enjoy glimpses of rural England flashing past. We pass through cuttings where bluebells cut ribbons of blue through lush green woods, and onto higher ground where we can see across green fields to farm houses and converted oust houses, both surrounded by neat gardens. It is like watching a sped up documentary of the rural south. Born in Kent I am always particularly excited to be passing through stations I have known before, Seven Oaks where my father went to school, Tunbridge Wells, where I’d had afternoon tea with my grandparents, Battle, I remember a pub meal with my aunt and uncle.

Motherlode

Spring is sprung in Kent again;
Clouds dissolve in gusty rain,
Showers peter, sun peeps out,
But still it drips from water spout.
Lush green grass rolls up the hills,
Trees burst out and landscape fills.
Green Man laughs as winter wanes
And baby leaves green-arch the lanes.
Water sparkles in fields and dams,
Larger cream dots lie next to lambs.
Horse-chestnut, hawthorn and bluebell,
 All names recalled I once knew well.
The views are also much beloved,
Rolling downs with clouds above.
Kent my starting place, my dame,
You’re in my soul and in my vein.

Julia Catton

With Takis in Canterbury we stay at The House of Agnes, named, evidently, after David Copperfield’s final and true love. However the house actually dates a long way back, before Dickens. The house was here when medieval pilgrims arrived at the West Gate of Canterbury. And even before the house was built this was a Roman foundry, and here a Roman cemetery was sited, just outside the walls of the city.

The House of Agnes now stands among a row of houses, between a fish and chip shop, run by an Italian, and a real estate office. However it still impresses, with its tall pointed roofs and timbered facade. Inside the floor levels vary, and the beams extend in every direction, so that you must watch your step and your head.

Paris, 2014

 

View from our hotel room in  Paris

I was particularly looking forward to a very different stopover, in Paris. Arriving in there felt a bit like being in London in Spring. The linden and birch trees were covered with fragile new green leaves. Pink blossom covered the tops of the catalpas and was beginning to drop onto the pavements below. (And I found myself sneezing whenever I was under the lightly falling linden blossoms.)

I notice that pedestrians and traffic seem to mix with the same tolerance I’d noticed in Lemnos, giving the centre of this great city the feel of a small village. In the small squares elderly ladies pulled shopping trollies, and then disappeared through tall wooden doors into high elegant buildings.

Outside the museums there are gypsies. Two girls approached me and pretended they were deaf and dumb trying with sign language to get me to give a donation. I didn’t have any euros, and as soon as I made this know they moved on, chatting to each other!!

Not long after this, decided lining up outside a museum was not worth the time, Takis and I went to sit on a bench on a bridge over the Seine, under an umbrella. Another gypsy man approached us, pretending to pick up a gold ring then offered it to me, saying I am to be the lucky one. What an old trick! But Takis was one ahead of him. He let him know we were not taken in and asked him questions about his situation, finally telling him he would accompany him to a supermarket, to buy a sandwich. To my horror the two took off, leaving me sitting in the rain, imagining the worst. That Takis might be mugged, and I would never see him again! But they returned. The gypsy, now with his family, sat nearby eating lunch, and Takis and I wandered off to find ours. The ring? In the gypsy’s pocket, ready to catch the next gullible tourist.

Arriving in Lemnos

 

 

 

 From Athens we take an Aegean Airlines to Lemnos. John the taxi driver meets us with his Mercedes, and we have a comfortable ride as the evening darkens. All we see are dusky hedges and car lights as we wend through small lanes. Takis finds the key and we walk into this now very familiar house. We immediately begin re-acquainting ourselves with such simple objects as the kitchen table, the light switches, and finally the bed we are to sleep in that night.

Travel is not all good though, as in any adventure things do go wrong.

But when things go wrong I can depend on Takis always seeing the positive side of things. And should things go really bad and we are unable to return to Greece next year he’ll just say, ‘It’s gone bung’, and immediately look for the positives in our situation. Perhaps he’ll make one of his Greek jokes or just use that useful Greek gesture for acceptance of life and human follies – the shrug with circling hands, palms up, that often is accompanied by the words ‘then birasi’ (it doesn’t really matter).