Catamaran Day Cruise Along Naxos’s West and South Coasts
Today we set out for the first of our two scheduled boat outings this week in Naxos. One we organized by ourselves and another via our travel agent.
Markups via luxury travel agents are huge on stuff like this — the upside is you 1) don’t lift a finger to come up with the idea, make a decision, research or plan 2) you know you’re getting a vetted/legit experience and 3) it’ll be high-end/private/indulgent. And sometimes you want that (more so on vacation than on a trip around the world, at least in our case), but other times you don’t mind putting in the time to research and getting something a little less fancy/not private for about a quarter the price.
So this trip we did both. Today was our Sullivan-researched/booked boat, the Danae, one of two catamarans owned by a locally operated company called Naxos Yachting. It was a great day.
We actually opted to book the boat just to ourselves, mainly because we didn’t want to ruin other people’s Greek isles boat day with a 7 and 9 year old. But actually, they were so well behaved that it would’ve been fine.
Our skipper was Mario and his “crew” was his obvious love interest, Myrto. Teddy and I spent much of the ride speculating about their relationship.
We pulled away from the marina and spent the next 8 hours cruising the west and south coast of Naxos. We passed our villa (I’d brought my beloved binoculars and we spotted it), and made three stops for swimming, with food served on the deck at each — appetizers, lunch and finally dessert. At each we jumped off the boat, swam to rocks, floated in innertubes tethered to the back, drank beers, ate good food.
One of the things we ate for our snack were dolmas aka stuffed grapeleaves, which I never order at home because they’re never any good — dry, hard, flavorless, undercooked. But the ones they served on the boat were out of this world — small, salty, oily. We cleared a huge serving platter of them and I’m still dreaming about them now. Going to make it our mission to find good ones back in NYC.
Our fruit salad dessert was sprinkled with cinnamon, which we liked. The kids especially liked a slice of banana on top of a slice of apple, sprinkled with cinnamon, held together by a toothpick. Seems like a good one to remember and use at home!
At one point I looked at my phone because I got a text from Joanna (I’d asked her if she’d seen our trainer Kirill without me this week). Willa and James starting impersonating me when I look at my texts. They’d look at imaginary phones in their hands and feign surprise/delight while reading:
James: “Oh! Jake Albson says he got a new skateboard!”
Willa: “Oh! Catherine McCarson’s daughter has the same swimsuit as Megan Wilson’s daughter!”
These are total fiction, including the names (Jake Albson??). To the kids, my reading aloud of texts are just more “BGT” aka Boring Grownup Talk, and a definite precursor to the eventual, “Do you remember Jake Albson? He was the one with the skateboard all those years ago? Well his niece’s hairdresser just got married.” Cool story, mom.
I think the water here is the clearest/most beautiful we’ve ever seen in the world? Trying to think of a comparison. Personally I’m partial to Corsica and its rock beaches and more green/turquoise crystalline waters, but it’s hard to brush Greek island waters out of the top 3, especially for kids. Swimming pool color, warm, calm, clear down 50 ft, almost no sea life.
The boat was a reminder for the thousandth time that Willa and especially James love making chit chat with grownups. They disappeared into the cabin with Myrto during the first hour and we came by later to find them regaling her with different tales — the piranha story, how their grandpa has a sailboat and even, at one point, the rules of Downtown Little League. They played charades, got to steer the boat, Myrto braided Willa’s hair, she even jumped off the boat holding hands with Willa twice. It was a love fest. The undivided attention of a grownup — sans BGT — is their heaven.
By 5:30 we were back at the marina and bidding our new friends farewell. After we’d long gone, Willa informed us that James had told Myrto he needed a new butt because his has a crack in it. D’oh!
It was a perfect day and we all slept very hard that night.
Misc:
I’m reading My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durell – pub’d in the 50s about his childhood in Corfu/Greece in the 30s. Wickedly funny in that British way. The kind of book Peter Mayle must have read and been inspired by. Locals are depicted as confounding cartoonish characters that the British clearly look down upon, but it also has fantastic descriptions of dusty old villas and hot olive groves. Very very funny and evocative of a Greece that does not exist anymore. The perfect read for right now.
