Well at last, after nearly 7 months in our winter berth in Sicily, we are leaving tomorrow for Greece with a view to exploring the northern Aegean this season.  Our rather overlong stay here was broken up by 2 visits back to the UK.  The first of these was for a family Christmas get-together and other assorted appointments and reunions.  More recently, we delayed our departure from here to be in Cambridge for the birth of our new granddaughter, Jodie, who arrived a whole 18 days late on April 9^th.  Now we have even more pulls to family and will probably leave Goldcrest somewhere in Greece in midsummer for another visit to grandchildren in France and now in GB too.  We hope to see link up with Stuart and Lisa in the islands somewhere and Patsy and Roger are once again joining us from Sydney for a few weeks in June/July.

We did hire a car for a week in March to explore more of Sicily and had a great time visiting fabulous ancient Greek ruins (enhanced by wonderful wildflowers), the famous mosaics of the Villa Romana with its “bikini” girls, gorgeous countryside, delightful seaside towns and the magnificent Byzantine mosaics of Palermo, Monreale and Cefalu cathedrals.  If you don’t know Sicily already, it really is a place of wonders and the food is terrific too.

Otherwise the marina here is a very sociable place with a large winter liveaboard community from all over northern Europe.  Most people don’t spend the whole winter aboard however, and if we were to return here ourselves, we would make sure it wasn’t for so long.  It has also been an unusually cold and windy winter which we were not expecting.

So Greece next and then maybe we will head west again.  We might get to the Canaries this winter, but we think we said that last winter too, so it may not happen!

Greek Temple at Segesta with wildflowers in foreground:

The famous “Bikini Girls” mosaic at Villa Romana Casale:

The Greek bronze satyr at Mazara, dredged up by a local fisherman from 300m depth and 2000 years old:

Ragusa, our nearest large town, looking great in the sunshine despite the cold!