Welcome back to Elixir's Cruising Blog



Home at Mount Maunganui, New Zealand

It has been almost 2 years since I updated Elixir's blog during this time Elixir has been sitting on the hardstand area of Cleopatra Marina in Preveza, Greece, none too patiently I might add. Meanwhile Jenny and I had to return to New Zealand as the piper needed to be paid, The Grace Avenue family home completed and sold, a solution found for the tenanting of our little home in Tauranga and a multitude of our valuable Real Estate Clients in bad need of gruntling. All was going well for us to return to Elixir in July last year to start our voyage back home by yacht, when Jenny, bless her cotton sox, threw herself down on the concrete behind my car and broke both her wrists.



Massive change to our planning as encased in plaster from her fingers to her elbows on both hands she clearly was not going to be the best crew in the world. I quickly got with the program and learned a lot of new tricks about the house. I now understand why it is that it can take a woman soooo long to get dressed! for 7 weeks she was in Plaster and then she had to go through extensive physiotherapy before we could even contemplate reinstating our Elixir plans. I think I aged 10 years in the process too! Mother always said there was a lot to be said for feminine mystery and finally I was let into the secret and by joves she really was very right.

All that was put behind us when, on 1st March 2016, we said our goodbyes to all our grandchildren and grown up family and took off into the wild blue yonder to look forward to returning on the big blue wobbly stuff. While Jenny let go of the floodgates in the tear department I must admit to getting a rather large impediment in my throat as the plane left the tarmac in Taupo for Auckland International on the start of our odyssey.


On the way to Elixir we made a bit of a holiday of it and called to stay in Kuala Lumpur once again with my Brother Ian and his wife Jenny-May. We were there for 7days whereupon Ian and Jenny-May lived up to their high standards of ensuring that undernourished, little skinny New Zealanders, left with quite a few extra kilos attached to their midriffs. No worries, we will try to think of ways at sea to lose a bit of weight.





Had the Shangri-La known that we were to dine there that night on their smorgasbord I think they may have closed for a day or two! Ian and I would have cleaned up a couple of sacks of oysters before we even started on the mains. I was going to call it a day before pudding but was not going to let little brother outperform me! Sleep came hard that night!

09/03/16 Next stop 3 days in Istanbul, always a wonderful place to visit. We had booked a very nice hotel, through e-dreams, right in the heart of the tourist area beside the Mosques, Spice Markets and the great Ottoman Wall. The hotel was called the Regie Ottoman and I have to say the staff were fabulous as was everything about the hotel even to the extent of welcoming us with wine and fruit because we were from New Zealand. Yes this is a bit of a plug but we think that this hotel thoroughly deserve it for making our stay so wonderful and stress free.















We had brilliant weather while we were there and we had a great time in the busy streets and markets.

11/03/16 In the flight from Istanbul to Corfu there was 2 hours to spend in Athens International where we cleared immigration finally arriving in Corfu at 8pm. Torrential rain and 6 degrees, black black night and hello we had left the name of our hotel on a pad in Istanbul. Greek names are hard enough without trying to get a taxi to find a hotel we only had a vague idea where it might be. No worries, a couple of hours spend driving around and we finally found the right place. Room service was employed to bring us a cup of tea to our room and we slept the sleep of the just.



12/03/16 Next morning after a good breakfast we employed a taxi again to take us, in the teaming rain, to the mainland ferry. On the way to the ferry I had the taxi stop at a hardware shop where I bought a 3 x 3 bright orange canvas, I just thought that it may come in handy.





Catching up on a few Zs during the crossing.







We got off the ferry in the rain 1.5hrs later in Igoumenitsa where at I parked Jenny guarding our luggage under the canvas and went off to locate a rental car to get us to Preveza some 100 Kilometres away. By the bye I got the car from a company called Green Motion, a name not lost on Jenny who tittered away for some minutes with various references to change of diet and aeroplane food and such!



I managed to hire a Fiat Punto for 4 days, decided to pay the extra for 100% insurance knowing that the weather is going to be foul and every other sod will be driving on the wrong side of the road!



File photo of Preveza. It was too wet, cold and dark to get a new one!

Got to Elixir, still in the pouring rain and cold as the Antarctic no worse for wear even though by now Jenny has noticed a few more grey hairs on her head. What is this stress, where stress? Hoisted two years worth of baggage up onto the boat employing the good old reefing lines used for hoisting trick, slammed the hatch closed and dealt to a bottle of wine and a large part of my remaining rum! Jenny had by now developed this annoying habit of talking about the lovely weather that Vietnam was experiencing! To make matters worse, we had no heater, we had no food, the whole town of Preveza was in lockdown for two days for a holiday for the flying of Kites! Ok, Ok only in Greece in the middle of a thunderstorm on the coldest day of the year! The poor locals had worked for weeks on their floats and parade only to have it totally washed off. You know they still went ahead with it even in the conditions!



It didn't take Jenny long to find her bunk!

A lovely Israeli couple working on their boat lent us their heater for a day as they were not staying on board, that made a huge difference to our stay. No1 item on our shopping list = 1 x heater.

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