Inter Rail 1987 Day 16

Got up and had breakfast i.e. a few cups of coffee. We followed Xenophon, Dinos and Kati's son downtown to drop off the hire car. A little man was waiting for us and took the keys from us in the street.

We finally managed to track down a British newspaper, The Times, which contained details of the General Election results, the Queens birthday honours list and the Rugby World Cup. 200 dracs extremely well spent.

Had two abortive attempts to ring home from sone coinboxes, but had to give up to meet up with Xenophon for a lift back to the house. He took us via the telephone offices where we got through to the Partingtons for a chat. They promised to ring Mum and Dad to let them know we were safe.

We spent the rest of the morning reading the Times cover to cover (both of us) before meeting up with a couple of friends of Dinos who had come round for lunch. He was the head of Mechanical Engineering whilst she was an ex-student. Lunch consisted of a ruddy great dollop of spag bol followed by hamburger and salad, all cooked, with a little supervision, by Dinos.

Athena headed back to Athens on the afternoon bus. We all had siestas. At about 6.00pm we emerged from the land of nod and Dinos lent us the car to go down to Dion beach for one last swim. Seemed a lot colder due to our hot water swim of the day before. Then it was back up to the house to pack the rucksacks and have one last chat with Dinos and Kati before he drove us down to the docks to catch the Brindisi ferry.

We had to pay our port tax and queued unnecessarily. Then we got ignored by the passport people. Eventually a guy told us we had to go back and go through passport control properly. He also told us to hurry because the ship was sailing in 15 minutes i.e. 30 minutes earlier than we expected from the timetable and the ticket. We ended up having to get our passports stamped at the "Greek persons only" counter.

To get onto the ship as foot passengers you have to enter via the car deck as yet again it wasn't a cross channel style Ro-Ro ferry but back loaded with vehicles. From what we saw of the inside it was very comfortable and air conditioned. However, as deck class passengers we were very quickly ushered away. After a bit of corridor wandering we eventually made our way to the top deck next to the forward superstructure so as to have sheltered sleeping for the night.

A very relaxed sounding announcement told us how to change money at the Purser's office. Wandered down and were just in time to see that the European basketball final was at 101:100 Greece v USSR with 30 seconds to go. Passengers went wild when Greece were awarded a foul with 4 seconds to go, ecstatic with each one of the two points scored and delirious when the buzzer went and Greece won.

Back up on deck we opened our bottle of Retsina. It tasted a little of mold to start with but once we got used to it, it wasn't too bad and one and a half litres disappeared. An announcement was made that instead of stopping at Corfu and Igoumenitsa we were going to go to Brindisi direct arriving at 11.00am rather than 5.00pm. We had another bottle of Venetian red wine to celebrate.

We settled down for the night amongst the stars in sleeping bags up on deck making sure to keep on the side of the superstructure which would get the sun the latest.