Jer post
It’s great to be back on Agility and in the Mediterranean. We arrived to Greece very early Wednesday morning after an 11 hour layover in Frankfurt (brutal) and hit the ground running. Originally, we had planned to spend two nights in Athens at a beautiful old hotel to give ourselves some jet lag recovery time, but the Easter holiday forced us to hurry to Agility so that we could get her in the water before the boatyard crew took off for a week. Everything went smoothly and we were fueled and docked before noon. Tim and I went into Lavrio where we scoped things out, had a nice late lunch, and walked back to the marina. Over the next day and a half, we provisioned, organized and cleaned, did some repairs, and were able to take off to go anchor near Sunio (Poseidon’s Temple) Friday afternoon.
One thing that is different about sailing and vacationing is that most of the pre-trip planning is focused on the boat. We spend the weeks (sometimes months and years) prior to leaving making sure we have everything we need for the boat to be shipshape – organizing work to be done, figuring out general weather patterns, etc. Knowing that we are often staying in an area for several months, we don’t spend a ton of time doing typical trip research. I was caught off guard by the intensity of the Easter holiday in Greece. The streetlights are decorated with red ribbon and lavender sprigs, there are gorgeous Easter baskets and red eggs (I need to figure out the significance of red for the Easter holidays here), tons of whole lambs 
for sale (heads and entrails included) at the grocery stores and butcher markets, lots of vacation time and so far two nights of all night revelry. Friday night involved restaurants opened for resurrection suppers beginning at midnight and a very loud service of some type starting at 2:30 a.m. Last night Tim and I were woken up by fireworks at midnight. There were two boats in the harbor, one right off of our bow, setting off quite the display and there must have been 1000 people in the streets with candles. The big church on the hill was amplifying chanting that went on until at least 1:30 a.m. Apparently, Friday night was focussed on mourning and last night was celebrating, but both were done with a lot of gusto. Today is for families to be together at private residences to continue the festivities and my best guess is that Monday and Tuesday are recovery days.
Other than observing the entertaining Easter goings on, we walked up to Sunio yesterday, saw a turtle, had a bizarre conversation with a Japanese woman who insisted there are no lobster in the Pacific (only crab), had a delicious Greek salad and grilled fish for lunch out, motorsailed to Kea, walked around Kea, and have discussed all of the work we need to do. I’m reading Boys in the Boat, weather is calm for now, and life is good.