Hi, all, and Happy New Year!
Yes, we’re back, and yes, we have been away, and yes, some of you may have seen these images and heard these stories before via Facebook, and, yes, the next several days will all be about our recent trip. I don’t know about you, but I like reading other people’s travelogues, but if you are not of the ilk, then don’t panic. As I write these posts and share these galleries over the next several days, I will drop in any Symi-related thoughts that come to mind.
The galleries will come at the end of the post unless a specific illustration is needed along the way.
My last post of 2025 (below) provided a map of the trip we had spent over a year planning and saving for, but as must happen on Symi, all trips begin with a boat. Or is a ferry a ship? ‘You can put a boat on a ship, but you can’t put a ship on a boat,’ my dad used to say, and although I agree, I still call the ferry (which carries lifeboats) a boat.
Whatever. Here’s the story.
It’s ten past five on the morning of January 2nd, 2026, and our party has gathered outside an unusual hotel ten minutes’ drive from Athens airport. We have an included transfer booked for 06.15, and the boarding of our homeward flight to Rhodes begins at 07.10 – so there’s plenty of time. We are already checked in, because we came down from Bucharest to Athens last night, landing at 22.50 and arriving at the hotel at just before midnight, as we had to wait for the transfer. Although I’ve only had three hours’ sleep since New Years’s Day morning, I have wrestled with a baffling automatic coffee maker machine thing with pods, had a spit of cold espresso, and I am functioning in a bleary kind of way. Still, no worries, the car will be here…
A phone call…
The driver is running ten minutes late. We are back in Greece, so this turns into 25 minutes late, and boarding time is fast approaching. And, as we are approaching the airport, we get caught in slow-moving traffic because it seems the rest of Greece is also flying home early that morning. And then there’s the queue at security, and time is ticking away…
Will we make the flight, and how did we get to be there?
The story unfolds…
Leaving Symi, we were among the passengers on the last Friday boat before Christmas, and, despite the queue of cars reaching back to the main road, and the other half of the Symi population being on foot, the boat left only a couple of minutes late. We were in no hurry, as we had a day and night in Rhodes. We had booked into the Castellum Suites, the all-inclusive hotel we now use in the winter, because it has to be the best value for money I’ve yet found in Rhodian accommodation. More about the hotel in a future post, for now, we are doing last minute shopping, before having an early dinner and an early night, because the alarm is set for 04.00 the next morning. Taxi at 04.30, airport at 04.50, check in for the flight which leaves on time at 06.00 to take us to Athens. I love Rhodes airport in the winter, even at that time of day. There’s something about walking from the departure gate, down the slope, across the tarmac and onto the plane without having to take a bus. It suggests the airport trusts us, and that’s a cosy feeling.
Then, there’s the usual 40-minute flight to Athens, which is more like catching a bus than a plane, then there’s a short wait and a transfer, and we’re off to Milan, where we take our first train of the trip. This one has not been booked, as there was no need, though by the time we find the ticket office, we’ve missed one and have a two-hour wait for the next. By the time we’ve opted for the first-class cabin on the train (as it was only €20.00 more than normal class), found a loo, as older men in the cold must, and bought our tickets, we have 90 minutes to wait. However, with the tickets comes access to the 1st class lounge for free drinks and snacks, so we sit and look down on the travellers below for some time while enjoying railway hospitality.
[For a look into the world of railway hospitality in ‘the old days’, take a look at ‘1893’, my second Clearwater Tales novella. Click here.]
The train arrives, we board, and find we do indeed have our own four-seat enclosure, and we enjoy a very comfortable ride to Verona, where we find a distinct drop in temperature. Quick loo stop, and on to the hotel, which is a 20-minute walk away. Luckily for us, we have the male equivalent of Dora the Explorer (which, admittedly, I’ve never seen, but…) in the form of Harry the Huntsman who has the ability to glance at a map of a foreign city and get from A to D without having to fuss about the B and C, so we follow him off towards the older part of town. We will soon get used to following the bouncing puffer jacket as he takes on the role of expedition map reader, and the pounds simply drop off us as we double-time to keep up.
We could easily have spent a week exploring Verona, but the idea of the trip wasn’t so much full explorations of the destination, but to grab a quick bite of each while making ‘the journey the thing’ as Homer never said. So, it’s two nights in Verona with a day-trip to Venice planned for the day in between, and that will be coming along tomorrow. Meanwhile, Verona is in full swing, and we swing by the Christmas market on the hunt for dinner. This ended up being in a small pizzeria away from the main drag, and there, I had my first proper Italian pizza. Well, we all did, because when in Rome (or nearby), act like a Veronese.
Did we get a chance to visit the amphitheatre? Sadly, no, but we walked for miles, saw loads, ate too much, and, after a long day, fell into the hotel early to prepare for a grand day out on the Grand Canal the next day.
[Meanwhile, on Symi yesterday, as I write, it’s raining, we’ve had a brief power cut, I’ve tried to fill some cracks on the bathroom roof as the paint has failed a little, and we’ve got three heaters running. Eek.]
