Piraeus, Greece – Wednesday 18th April

I woke up at 7 am and wondered why I was falling out of bed.  The ship was listing heavily to the port side and there was a storm raging outside.  In the Lido restaurant Keith saw crockery smashing onto the floor and he struggled to bring my morning tea back to the cabin in one piece.  It was actually quite difficult to walk up the cabin to open the door!  All this because the captain was trying to get into Piraeus harbour and a 70 knot wind was making us keel over.  He came on the tannoy to tell us that there was nothing to worry about but we would have to go back out to sea and wait out the storm with our head to the wind.  About 4 hours later, with the help of two big tugs we managed to get to the dock, but we had to have the engines going and two tugs pushing at our side to hold us against the quay.

The Marina

Piraeus is the port for Athens and most people were either booked on tours or planning to go in on their own.  It was disappointing for them that tours had to be cancelled or curtailed, but they still managed to see the main sights.  I was not too keen on Athens, having been mugged there last year, so we had planned to stay in Piraeus.  We made our way down to the Marina hoping to visit a bar or two and then walk along the coast, but we hadn’t really bargained for the stormy weather which made walking anywhere near the seafront very unpleasant – also most of the bars were shut.  We wandered through  the main shopping area  but it was noticeable that several shops were abandoned – the result of the recession I guess – and the others didn’t have many people in them.  It was all a bit depressing so we came back to the ship early.

We were supposed to sail away at 5pm but the strong winds meant we couldn’t leave until about 10 pm – and then only with the help of three tugs.  This, plus continued high winds meant that we couldn’t reach Rome by Friday morning so today (Thursday) the captain has told us that he has cancelled our call to Monte Carlo on Saturday so that we  can have a full day in Rome instead.  We are quite disappointed as we wanted to explore Monte Carlo  - now we will have an extra day at sea on Friday – I suppose we can start packing!  We have certainly left the good weather behind, it is only about 13C now – breaking us in for the homecoming no doubt.