Dearest Family and Friends,

I'm writing from a little cove in Corfu, Greece in the Ionian Sea, where we
just arrived today after a 30 hour sail from Bar, Montenegro.

But, first things first. We had a very nice week in Split, Croatia
rendez-vousing with our sailing buddies Sandy and Martin in a free, yes,
FREE anchorage. yippeee. We really liked the old Roman and medieval town
of Split. And, i have to say that since my last Chaligram when we were
still smarting from paying $92 for 1 night at the Zadar marina, we did
manage to find free anchorages for the next 10 days. So, in balance, it
wasn't all that bad. Heading south from Croatia, we spent a week in
Montenegro, which just became independent (from Yugoslavia) last year, and
although they're not part of the EU, they DO use the euro, so it was nice to
be using familiar money again.... although the language is still the
unfamiliar serbo-croatian that we had in croatia. Of course, now that we're
in Greece,
we can't even READ the words since the greek alphabet is totally different!

Montenegro was much more laid back and MUCH less expensive than Croatia.
Although we didn't have to pay to anchor, we were blasted by what Chuck
calls "euromadness": a solid wall of VERY LOUD MUSIC/NOISE eminating from
the beaches/town til about 2am.... every night in July and August. I
wonder, do the beaches in the USA do this? it's been so long i wouldn't
know. Anyway, Montenegro was spectacular. As the name "black mountain",
suggests, the mountains were very high and the beautiful Bay of Kotor was a
fjord-ish bay, shaped like a bowtie, sorta. It's hard to to describe, but
if you google-earth it you'll see what i mean. The old walled city of Kotor
had walls that went all the way up the mountain, not just around the town.
We also visited Herceg Novi and Budva, and we celebrated our 29th wedding
anniversary in Bar.

We did an overnight sail and arrived in Corfu, the northernmost of the
Ionian islands of Greece. We're anchored right now in a little cove and had
dinner at the single taverna here. I don't think there's going to be any
loud music either, yea!

Happily, although it's very hot here, it's a drier heat than in croatia and
montenegro, so it's not quite as uncomfortable. plus, there's always the
really clean water to jump into to cool off. The best thing about Bar,
Montenegro was that we were tied at a dock and had electricity and we used
our air conditioner! ahhhhhhhh bliss.

not sure when we're going to get hooked up with the internet, so it might be
a
few days til this actually gets sent out.

[LATER: we bought a little WIFI time at the marina where we are right now,
so i'm able to get this sent out.]

for those of you who have been receiving our Chaliventures emails since our
first shake-down cruise to maine in 2003 -- when everything broke, and
someone ELSE had to fix or replace the broken THING-- you'll be interested
to know that Chuck spent Saturday repairing our step down transformer that
allows us to plug in our US-powered boat into the european power syste, and
today he replaced our refrigerator pump with a new one. hope it works. it's
not the same kind as the original. I guess you could say that we're (read,
HE) is making great progress on that whole self-sufficiency thing!

hope all is well with ya'll and you're having a great summer.

XO,

Alison, Chuck and zoey who's a little sick.