Weekend away from it all

Last Friday we escaped the "rat race" we call Assos for a well earned break in Sunny Lefkas to stay with friends Liz and Tony at Tony's villa. If anyone wants an excellent villa for a reasonable price Tony's villa can be booked on the owners direct website (http://www.ownersdirect.co.uk/greece/GR120.htm) We arrived early in order to see if the rumour that they don't get up until 2pm was correct but Liz was up and Tony was almost up! Tony and I had a great walk looking at some other houses nearing completion and hoping to get past some fierce hounds at a farm down one of the roads but I managed to get Sandra nearer to them last year and Tony elected to return via the route we came. Anyway after a fine meal I was all set up for doing the annual pruning around the villas the next day. I was actually very pleasantly surprised by the general condition of the gardens which tony (a self confessed none gardener) had looked after since I gave them a good seeing to last spring, the boy done well! It was really a case of getting all the climbing plants back into reasonable shape and cutting back some of the surrounding shrubbery to stop all the seeds etc. ending up in the pool. Still it took two full days.

Anyway while in Lefkas town we managed to go to the town cinema to see "Did you hear about the Morgans", which for a Rom-Com I found very entertaining but that's only part of the story. The cinema is like the ones of my youth but with much more leg room and clean. They only seem to have one projector so you get a mid film intermission to enable the man in the little room to load the next spool. No Perle and Dean adverts while he's doing it either! When the film starts again you hear the rapid clicking build up and the sound slurring for a few seconds and then your back into the action.

We had a ride around the island on Monday and visited some friends of Liz & Tony's and had a gander at their houses, one was a log cabin style house which I quite liked and also a place down near Sivota with a huge plot of land and quite a character who owned it, just a shame about the long drive down 4x4 country to get there. We also went to see the little housing complex owned by Liz's sister and her husband with beautiful views over Vasiliki town and the islands of Ithaca and Kefalonia. There are Liz's and her sisters houses and two new ones they have built to rent out. We think maybe next year we may be able to have Tree's house but I ain't sure whether the offer was serious, we'll see anyway.

Tuesday was raining, and Sandra and I sat in the kitchen heard this chopping noise coming from Yannis house below us, looking over the balcony we saw Spyros and Youta (our landlords) with a couple of guys hacking a lamb up so I went down to investigate and take some pictures. 5 euros a kilo he paid for it (about £2/lb at current exchange rate) and it was still warm when I felt it. You could never get away with doing it this simply back home! The pictures shows Giorgos a local farmer (left) and Spyros & Yourta, notice the Lichen growing on the sides of the chopping block! Then Giorgos and Yourta splitting the carcass.

I have also been doing some DIY this week, firstly we picked up some plumbing fittings it Lefkas while we were there and I have now got hot running water in the kitchen prior to this the hot water only went into the bathroom so it was a case of boiling kettles for washing up but now we have luxury. Also I have converted the short Greek double bed into a standard size English double by adding 10.5 inches to it's length, if Sandra kicks me out of bed now I can get some proper sleep without having to hang over the end of the bed.

If only all things could have inches added to them so easily!