The title for today should be Beautiful Bays and it’s certainly lived up to them. Spetses has them in abundance, and not just the bays, all the rest if the island is exceptionally beautiful.
Having tendered into Spetses Town, we head South through an up-market area and around a bay. Here every house has a swimming pool and extensive grounds not that they are necessarily visible from street level, but I’m watching great on Google Earth too as I plot our course. As we walk out of town, the opulent takes a huge turn upwards, and before long w find a communal helipad for a collection of half a dozen “millionaires row” houses. The road we’re on is public, but the fences either side are clearly not. However the scenery is stunning and the deep azure water is only lessened in intensity where the grass is growing to make it darker in colour just like it was when diving in Kephalonia a couple of weeks ago.
We’re doing a circumnavigation of the island, and although we didn’t know it when planning, the road around is so far very well made, clearly no direct tracks on Spetses! As we continue clockwise around the island we marvel at each twist and turn in the inevitably torturous twists in the road, before long the helipads are not shared, instead each house has its own.
There’s a change in geography, and the houses dry up, but the coves, valleys and beaches don’t so it’s now public again. Sadly theres also a communal tip to walk past, I imagine these days this would not be allowed, but to clear it up would cost umpteen millions Greece probably cannot afford. We aim for one beach in particular because there’s a mention of a cave near by. It’s called Bekiri’s Cave, and when we get there the entrance is the size of a laundry chute - I struggle to get inside at all, certainly not with the rucksack on, however perseverance delivers a tiny beach, and a long low cavern. It’s also possible to swim in from the bay, and as I’m inside a family of Italians do this.
We continue around the route, using an off-piste solution to find the road, it turns out to be the winding driveway to a posh beach house but fortunately no-one is home to shout at us.
The road continues winding round and round the contours of the island so sometimes we’re close to the water, other times hundreds of metres inland, but it’s all very beautiful. There’s a lot of evidence of fire, presumably from last year as the bush is growing back although the trees have not yet sprung back to life. Also there are huge water bowsers stationed everywhere, presumably to help stymie the fires before they get a stranglehold next time.
About three quarters of the way round we head down to a beach with the intention of finding lunches and enjoy a club sandwich and beer before we continue. The beautiful blue skies had already turned overcast, and then grey, and meanwhile the rumbling of thunder was heard around the bays. This persisted for ages, but eventually it had to break, and the heavens opened with huge drops of cooling rain, enough to send most people running for shelter, but we argued that it was only rain, so continued walking until we hit the town and made it back to the all-important brown Seabourn awning signalling the return of sanctuary.
After walking 18.5 miles you’d think the 118 stairs from deck three, the “front door” of Oddyessy, up to our room door on deck ten, would be nothing, but its always hard, partly because, I think, the pitch if the stairs on the back stairwell is wrong. No one is going to change that though, so as usual we struggle up them looking forward to the closing we’ll be getting soon. We decide to stick to deck eight today, mostly because the jacuzzis there are covered.
Over the space of the next few hours we manage Sea Breeze, champagne, ice cream, and snacks before going up to dress for dinner.
Tonight’s Thomas Keller dinner started out looking very promising. The first course is one we’ve had numerous times, it’s excellent duck foie gras and we love it. Then French onion soup, absolutely perfect. Then Hubby had TK chicken which was disappointing, coming under cooked (in our opinion, I know others will disagree) and I had his veggie offering of cauliflower en crôute, except it was the green spike variety that tastes like broccoli, and although nice enough isn’t fine dining. Puddings were Amaretto soufflé for him and TK apple trifle for me, mine was fab but the soufflé was a bit stodgy which is a shame because I’ve had several that were perfect.
Showtime is Mel Mellers whom we’ve seen a few times before. He is side-splittingly funny and so quick. Of course some nationalities might not get all his humour but for Brits (and probably Aussies) he is so good.
It was a beautiful moonlight night to finish of some champagne on the balcony writing this.
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