And it was time to move that journey forward. Our next stop was Sifnos, a neighboring island of Milos, and an hour ferry ride away.
As an epilogue to my last post, we saw a poster in the Milos ferry terminal rallying support to have the Aphrodite (aka Venus) de Milo returned to its home island.
This an interesting issue playing out in real time, and it raises a lot of ethical questions that I didn’t fully appreciate as a college student walking through the national museums of previous colonial powers. The full story is probably for more complex than I can understand after a quick vacation here, but my immediate gut-level sympathies are definitely with the host countries requesting their artifacts back.
But I didn’t have much time to ponder the ethics of captured artifacts as I chased a two year old around a working port.
She has spent the week looking at such large ferry boats that she now calls the Greek Navy battlecruiser that docked the night before a “baby boat.”
I don’t think “cute” was the look they were going for by placing a long gun up front, but my two year old thinks they nailed it.
A few minutes later, the ferry pulled in, and our daughter continued her charm offensive by running up and down the port yelling, “Yeah! Our boat’s here! Yeah!” It brought the house down.
We’ve been watching these ferries come in all week, and the speed with which they dock, unload, and reload never ceases to amaze us. It’s astounding. It takes the crew maybe 15 minutes to jump from the partially opened loading ramp, tie the boat to the dock, unload a hundred people, and then wave a couple dozen cars off the boat. And in this case, a full-size passenger bus as well. And then they do it all again in reverse.
We did our part to shuffle onto the boat in a timely fashion, repeating our head count of two adults, two kids, three bags, and four baklavas at several points along the way.
But we made it on board without any trouble. In fact, the crew remembered our kids (we’re no longer surprised by that), smiled, and waved us through pretty quickly.
This boat ride was quick—only an hour journey between islands. And thankfully this was our shortest ferry ride of the trip. The choppy water was rocking the boat quite a bit, and even the crew looked a little pekid.
At one point, I looked out the window and saw a sailboat getting tossed around far worse. I was happy to 1) Not be on that boat, and 2) Get my annual reminder that, no, buying a sailboat would not be a good idea.
But we made it to Sifnos without any vomit coming out of anyone who isn’t already supposed to be spitting up after each feed. And we were kindly rewarded.
I didn’t think this would have been possible, but Sifnos is somehow even prettier than Milos. Like it’s neighbor, Sifnos is a volcanic island, but this one is far more mountainous. Whereas Milos is pretty flat for several kilometers along the water, Sifnos goes straight from coastline to hilltop.
Our friends Nona and Grael (and Grael’s parents) had arrived in Athens the day before, and their ferry landed on the island about an hour before ours did. They were as exhausted as we were after flying 24 hours with a two year old, and they melted into their hotel room as we made our way across the island to meet up with them. One extremely-needed power nap later, Mimi and Conrad were ready to reunite on the beach.
We were just as excited to see Nona, Grael, and Grael’s parents.
Or at least Grael in this case. Looking back, I don’t have any photos of all six of us adults together for at least the first 36 hours, as two or three of us were continuously rotating off duty for a survival nap.
The toddlers continued to catch up over dinner, as the rest of us realized how much harder it was going to be to keep up with a couple of two year olds than it was to keep up with a couple of barely-mobile one year olds like we did in Viet Nam.
You can see Aimee on the edge of that photo making sure that Mimi and Conrad didn’t rile each other up enough to jump from the restaurant into the water. The energy of combined toddlers is exponentially greater than what they can come with on their own.
After dinner, the kids went to bed while the parents had a chance to catch up over a bottle of wine under the stars as we listened to the waves crashing along the shore.
Just kidding. That’s not even remotely true. We continued to chase around a couple of two year olds well into the night, as one of them was still on Mountain Standard Time, and the other one was drawing from his power source. But I’m sure someone on this island slept well that night.
Awake or sleeping, we couldn’t have been happier to spend the next few days together in yet another corner of paradise. At least one of our kids knew how to properly enjoy it.
