Ambrosia and nectar

Up on Mount Olympus those pesky classical gods ate ambrosia and drank nectar. Now, if you're anything like me you'll be imagining Artemis getting handy with the tin opener and heating up some creamed rice for Zeus. It's not clear to we mortals what ambrosia and nectar actually are but for me, right now, it wouldn't be Greek food. Now, don't get me wrong, any cuisine that suggests fried cheese as a starter (saganaki) is a winner in my books. It's just, after three weeks of eating Greek food I'm somewhat concerned that every time I enter a room someone will inquire: 'is it me or can you smell houmous?'

However, today is a day free of Greek food as I'm sat in my local park letting Evan act irresponsibly whilst I blog. Yesterday's airport standby led to an impromptu trip to Gatwick. Then, to my eternal gratitude, my Dad paid for a BA flight to Manchester for Evan and I rather than us having to do the Gatwick Express > London Underground > Leeds by train trip. 45 minutes and a complimentary red wine later I arrived (faintly squiffy) in Manchester. Home was a mere 42 miles away.

Back in Leeds I actually walked round my house saying hello to rooms and fondled the soft furnishings. I prioritised checking that Sky+ had the full complement of 'Doctor Who' logged and I enjoyed the feeling of being home. It's taken about 24 hours and 7 washing machine loads to feel that I'm no longer in transit. That I've arrived.

And for lunch I had my very own ambrosia and nectar:



Spaghetti hoops, cheese on toast and brown sauce washed down with instant coffee. Heaven.


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Location:Manston Gardens,Leeds,United Kingdom

Under an English sky

Ooh look. That's my front room!






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Location:Manston Grove,Leeds,United Kingdom

Ooh look

Guess where we are?




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Location:Timberham Farm Rd,Crawley,United Kingdom

Us and them

Sitting at Heraklion airport you learn about the 'us and them' mentality. I'm one of the 'them' who is sat on a case trying to look like I deserve to go home. The exclusive 'us' club are the few, the happy few who have booked tickets for today's Gatwick flight. Here they are. Smug so and so's.






I reckon they've all gone into the departure lounge where nymphs hand them peeled grapes whilst they recline on golden sedan chairs. Whilst we sit in the check-in hall on our over crammed suitcases and have bricks thrown at us (ok, I'm exaggerating for comic effect. Some of us are stood up).

There is a new game amongst the stranded community. It's called 'I'm more stranded than you Top Trumps'. In it you prove that you are waaay more stranded than other people. We have a pretty strong hand in that we have been stranded a week already, are not booked onto another flight for a week, and crucially have a 7 year old kid and 2 pensioners. Any people whose first cancelled flight was Tuesday have way fewer points than us unless they have the trump card of either a little baby or a wheelchair bound Granny. If she has a drip? Game over.

We British standby types are horrified to see that there is No Queue here. We're totally lost without it. We are milling in clumps of people and cracking jokes. But if we could only stand in an actual queue where we could see that he is going before me, but they are going we'd all be much happier.

Yamas!

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Mustn't grumble

The Phoney War continues; there are flights coming and going in the skies above Crete but tickets cannot be obtained for them. A story which is probably not being reported on UK news is that the overland route is now no longer available through Greece as Piraeus harbour is full of high speed ferries and cruise ships that could take travellers home. The only problem is that the dockers have gone on strike and you can't board the ferries. Ace.

Today has been a very quiet day and one where I've had to consider the true meaning of 'stranded'. There were no flights today so we went to the Milatos cave. Here, in 1823, up to 2,700 Greek men, women and children hid from the Ottoman Turk overlords during an uprising. The cave is in a remote bay, up a precipitous mountain road that even the goats see as a mite hairy to negotiate. The cave itself is extremely low and very deep. In this cave the Cretans hid until discovered by the Turks and besieged. Finally, the captives were offered safe passage by the Turkish officer in charge. On surrendering the Cretans were massacred or sold into slavery. A chapel built into the cave entrance stands testament to the struggle and the visible bones of the slaughtered in the ossuary gives one a chilling understanding of exactly what truly being unable to escape is.

I'm trying to learn to be more calm about the situation. I cannot get myself home any more quickly by stressing. My kids are being taught by my colleagues who are probably better teachers than I. If I could get home today I would. But I can't. I learnt a valuable lesson from the Taverna by the sea at which I ate my lunch. The name?






Whilst my northern European soul thinks it's my duty to endlessly recriminate to myself about the way I'm wantonly failing to do my duties, the southern European surroundings are trying to teach me to sit tight, calm down and not to stress about things that I cannot change. This holiday I've learnt about the numbing and inconceivably vast number of centuries between my own time and that of the proud Minoans who inhabited Crete. Pompeii's eruption in AD79 is as distant from the Minoans in one direction as I am from the Pompeians in the 21st century. In a timescale as vast as that 12 days of being stranded seems wafer thin and insubstantial. No stress.

Yamas!
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Location:Παλαιά Εθνική Οδός Ηρακλείου,Malia,Greece

We're saved! We're saved! Oh.

So, at midnight last night I settled down for a sleep when suddenly my 'phone started going crazy with texts to tell me that British airports had reopened at 10pm GMT (midnight here). My initial reaction was to consider pulling my pj top over my head and doing a lap of the pool to celebrate but I decided that was unseemly for a 38 year old Law teacher. And a mite chilly. And insufficiently scaffolded.

So, I'm saved! I'm going home! Well, not quite. The earliest flight my tour operator can book my whole family on is Friday 30th April, that's in 10 days' time! Thankfully I suspected this might occur and I booked a contingency flight for Evan & I earlier in the week whilst they were still available at a cost of €160. So we are hopefully going on Tuesday 27th which is about a week away. Now it seems that spending that much money on a spare flight is a bargain, particularly as I've heard of a colleague whose repatriation costs have exceeded £2000. But she's home now and I'm not.

Now I feel rather like I'm in a Phoney War. The chaos is over but it will be an entire working week until I'm back doing my job or pottering around my own home. We continue to make best endeavours to get back: we ring the consulate daily (I have to say Heraklion consulate staff are just lovely) and on Friday when Easyjet flights resume we're going to the airport again to see whether there's any chance of flying with them - although the website suggests they are all full.

Our international volcanic family is depleted now: our gorgeous Danish co-strandees Anne, Henrijk and Maja have set off for Denmark flying via Athens and Bucharest. I wish them well. The intrepid Jude and Shaun from Sheffield were last heard of in Italy and I hope they're making amazing progress across the continent and will beat me back to Yorkshire.

And whilst I'm sleeping again, and eating again and I've even done actual smiling I can't wholly relax. There's always a niggling worry the flights will be grounded again or that some unforeseen issue will stand between me and LS15. So if you know any millionaires with huge yachts floating round the Aegean right now you might want to suggest to them an exciting cruise between Crete and the Leeds - Hebble navigation. With four very polite passengers aboard.

Yamas!


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Location:Παλαιά Εθνική Οδός Ηρακλείου,Malia,Greece

Leave your own sofa at your peril

If your personality is pure lunacy knitted together with a hefty bundle of unwiseness you might consider leaving the postcode in which you live. Usually I live in LS15 and after the events of the past few days I am going to ask the probation service to electronically tag me to prevent me from ever wandering further than the end of the street. I will taser myself should I ever discover myself creeping into a Travel Agency. Don't do it kids, it ain't worth it. But - and I'm not suggesting you do - but if you persist in the wild recklessness of leaving your own gorgeous country (blessed as it is with Chinese takeaways and bus stops with poorly spelt English graffiti) you may become stranded in A Foreign Place.

This is a non-exhaustive list of advice I can proffer to the stranded traveller.
1. As soon as you get stranded your holiday STOPS. You are no longer a holidaymaker, now you are a hostage. Nothing is fun. Oddly, since I got stranded I haven't been taking photos (apart from the blog).
2. You'll go on a dirty protest. Heaven knows the last day I got up and immediately had a shower. My hair is so unkempt I look like Einstein's gran. I do not wear accessories or slap. I'm not saying I don't wash at all but you know the weird lady in each neighbourhood who collects indeterminate brown liquid in jam jars on their manky looking kitchen windowsill? I might become one of them soon.
3. Crying doesn't help but if you do it in a Travel Agent where there's a queue the nice Greek men let you go to the front. Or maybe it's because of the dirty protest smell. I did some quality crying at a Travel Agent today but I'm still on Crete.
4. You will miss spaghetti hoops. A lot.
5. You will start to come up with ever more daft ideas for repatriation. Today I honestly considered what sort of low level criminal activity would be sufficient to get me deported back to the UK, whilst not precluding me from resuming teaching duties there.
6. You will make the same three rubbish jokes all day. Our most lame is saying 'night night, see you next year' to the Taverna owner EVERY night.
7. Always get stranded in a hotel with FREE wifi.
8. You'll just really really really want to go home.

I'm now here for a week at least as that's the first flight I can get on to with Evan. My parents are here until the 30th. That's a looooong time. Maybe the Ark Royal will come to repatriate us before then. Or maybe not.

Yamas!
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Location:Παλαιά Εθνική Οδός Ηρακλείου,Malia,Greece

The Island of the Lotus Eaters

After a long argument at breakfast about trying to get overland I've had to give in and stay today. My parents don't even have a flight booking home now but are relaxed about that as Dad believes he'll be flying on Friday and fears I'm turning into a hysterical, proto-anorexic lunatic. And he's probably right. Evan says it's like the Island of the Lotus Eaters on the Odyssey where everyone gets stuck. He would.

I have €5 spending cash to my name so I'm going to get in touch with my travel insurance to see if I can get some funds to treat Evan to some exciting activities. Like, er, crazy golf.

As I'm stuck here for the future I need to get an income stream. The best plan I can see is that I should obsessively blog and attempt to become recognised as a European Lady of Letters whilst paying for my upkeep by economically exploiting Evan.

1. Income stream 1. Pool boy.






2. Income stream 2. Pool shark.






3. Income stream 3. Bar tender.




I might need to get a fake moustache for him to convince them that he's over 18. Will eyebrow pencil work?


4. Income stream 4. Celebrity chef.



Evan confirms he's mastered pizza and toasties and is now working on perfecting his spatchcock chicken with a ceps and artichoke coulis, parsnip flakes and an aniseed jus. Apparently it's a favourite lunchtime choice for y2.


5. Income stream 5. Lemon tree arboculture. Apparently he'll be a millionaire by next year.






So, wonder what the next few days and hours are going to bring?

Yamas!


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Location:Παλαιά Εθνική Οδός Ηρακλείου,Malia,Greece

Odysseys

One of the best things about coming to Crete has been the interest it has stirred in Greek Mythology for Evan. And if you asked him what his favourite story was he'd tell you it was The Odyssey. He'd be able to tell you about the Lotus eaters, Polyphemus the Cyclops, Circe, visiting Tiresias in the underworld and how Odysseus finally got home to Ithaca. His pronunciation of lots of these words is unusual - but gorgeous.

You know where this story is going, don't you? So, as I'm not a Classical scholar like my 7 year old son I'm a bit shaky on the details but I think I've been Cassandra for the past few days: the soothsayer of doom who is fated never to be believed but is right. I've been saying we need to set off over land and sea because it's not when the planes start flying again, it's if. And the situation in the UK is deteriorating again.

So, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. I've had another virtually sleepless night and have been frustrated by the fact that neither Aegean airlines nor Minoan ferries websites are compatible with the iPhone. I've decided to undertake the odyssey home and I've got the most difficult part of the journey to undertake in an hour or so: getting my parents to understand that I can't just sit on Crete for an indeterminate future. According to Seat 61 it takes 4 days to travel from Crete to London overland. Factoring in the disruption it might take me 6. But my first flight off this island is an entire week away and there is absolutely no guarantee that airspace will be available next week.

So, I'm going to face frustration, tiredness, overcrowding and boredom. Sounds better to me than Sirens and Scylla and Charybdis. But maybe that's what Homer was writing about all along: the overwhelming desire to see home again. I might be on odyssey to LS15 rather than Ithaca.

With huge apologies to Homer, classical scholars and my son I'm about to misquote... Tell me, Muse, of the resourceful single Mum and wee boy who were driven to wander far and wide ... We will see the cities of many people and we might learn something of their ways. I'm hoping to avoid great anguish on the high seas. And as a vegetarian I'm pretty safe from devouring the oxen of Hyperion, the Sun-god.

Wish me well - and if you're enjoying this blog please promote it. I'd like to see comments from well wishers as I struggle across Europe. Evan could tell you that the continent is named after Europa a beautiful woman carried to Crete by Zeus in the guise of a white bull. I have to say I've tried putting that into Google as a method of escape but www.godsofolympus.gr is incompatible with the iPhone.

Yamas!


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Location:Παλαιά Εθνική Οδός Ηρακλείου,Malia,Greece

Horrid notes for my parents to find on awaking

Summarised: flight cancelled. Please can we get off this island any way we can tomorrow? Am sick of being a hostage to fortune.

I'm going to stick it under their apartment door now. Feel rotten about being the bearer of bad news.

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Location:Παλαιά Εθνική Οδός Ηρακλείου,Malia,Greece

Flight cancelled

My flight tomorrow just got cancelled. I cannot express how upset I am right now.


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Location:Παλαιά Εθνική Οδός Ηρακλείου,Malia,Greece

Desperate hope

In between the cheap comedy shots of how we might get home I've been working really hard at trying to actually get home. And attempting as far as I can to do the parts of my job that can be done with an iPhone and free wifi hotspots.

I was awake to 4am last night trying to book a contingency flight for Tuesday 27th as it really wasn't looking at all hopeful that any airspace would clear today. My original flight is rebooked for nearly midnight tomorrow (Tuesday 20th) but I wanted a back up plan in case that one gets cancelled. There's a danger that you wait until your flight is cancelled and then you attempt to get on the next one, only to find it fully booked. Hence the contingency which I'm desperately hoping I won't need.

I awoke at 8am and checked my Twitter feed to find that the government was planning to send the navy out to repatriate the stranded. I rang the British consulate at Heraklion at 8.30 to try to get my name on a list to get home but they weren't compiling a list of Brits stranded here and told me to contact my airline instead.

Mid-morning was spent trying to email work in as best I could and discussing strategies to get home. Oh, and posting the last blog.

Then I got in touch with my son's Dad who is a railway engineer to see if his company could help with the long pan-continental rail trip home. Their response was that there was a 6 week lead time for rail travel coupons, there were no emergency provisions for this situation and they weren't planning any. Evan's Dad was great. Shame about his employers.

Then we discussed trying to talk a local tourist daytrip company into running a coach from here to Paris ideally. However all the tour offices were shut when I looked.

That left a trip to the airport to see whether there were options there. When we arrived I was really over-excited to find Air Mediteranee flights to Toulouse, Marseilles and Nantes flying this evening. However I soon established with their handling company that they were fully booked. I was trying to bite back tears as I queued at the information desk to get help with finding the British consulate office on a map.

Then I got this text from my boyfriend: 'Sky news breaking: sky sources understand plans are in place to open airspace in scotland at 0600, midland at 12 and south at 1800'. This led to frenzied attempts to open the Sky.com website on my iPhone but it just kept crashing.

So my family drove back to our resort where there is a coffee shop we know which shows BBC World. We sat through the dullest Hard Talk ever whilst hungrily reading the text feed at the bottom. At no point was there ANY reference to a relaxation of Air Traffic control over the UK. We were devastated. Even worse the hourly news report started and the whole report was simply the same newsclips that we'd watched being rehashed all day about losses. We gave up hope.

Then the most beautiful 'Breaking News' subtitle I've ever seen 'Manchester Airport to reopen at 8am'. My family screamed with joy, quite upsetting the old Greek men playing their clicky domino thingy game across the room. But then we all indulged in a game of acting out aeroplanes flying with outstretched arms and lots of grinning. So that was alright then.

So, am I going home tomorrow?I hope so desperately but I don't know.

Yamas x


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Location:Παλαιά Εθνική Οδός Ηρακλείου,Malia,Greece

Brotherhood of Man

No, the 70s Eurovision winners haven't been sent to entertain the stranded. By all accounts throwing oneself into a lava flow is preferable. No, what I'm finding is that until the flight chaos every holidaymaker on this island was an individual, and now we are a community. In my hotel there are 5 sets of guests and we all know each other by first name and spend breakfast discussing updates and potential repatriation strategies. In town there are the same people in the Taverna each night and we greet each other like colleagues. Martha, the Taverna owner, is planning to introduce us to her mother-in-law in the matriarchal village as her international volcano family.

At times like this you see the very best of people. Today I let my iPhone out of my grasp for a while so my Danish friends here could Skype their family. Their conversation was whether they could fly to Vienna and then catch the train to Denmark.

With some southern airspace opening today we are now looking into how to travel overland. The nautical ideas tried yesterday were unsuccessful so now we are searching for terrestrial alternatives.

1. The Great Escape 1. The motorcar. This one appears cheap but not particularly spacious.




Although it may be easier to extract than this one:




2. The Great Escape 2 - a luxury motorhome



This one may be ditched in, erm, a ditch but it offers free boat transfers. Across the channel potentially?

3. The Great Escape 3. Coping with potential natural hazards - rockfalls and the like:




4. The Great Escape 4. Horsepower.



5. The Great Escape 5 - pedalpower.



6.The Great Escape 6. Desperation sets in.



The mop bucket has wheels and maybe we can set up some sort of propulsion system with the gas canisters? Would this be adversely affected by volcanic ash?

Oh, it's raining today too.

Yamas!
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Necessity is the Mother of Invention

Right. I want to go home so we have been prototyping various methods for getting from one island nation (Crete) to another (England)

Method 1: the simple raft.


Method 2: hi-tech pedalo.



Method 3- There's room on my board for 2



Method 4 - an actual ship called Nana, with Nana at the helm. Sadly as it's part of a playground it might not be as seaworthy as we would require on the Bay of Biscay





Method 5 - Evan has his Dolphin 5 badge and can do a whole length without putting his foot down. Is this sufficient?



Method 6 - Crete is the island of Icarus and Daedalus. Are palm tree wings susceptible to volcanic ash?



Icarus played by Dad. Evan as Daedalus.




This is all proof that we tried really really hard to get home.

Yamas!


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Easy like Sunday Morning

I awoke this morning to 89 tweets on my Twitter feed regarding the ash cloud situation. These can be summarised into the following categories. You may note that the messages are somewhat contradictory:
1. The volcanic explosion is ending / getting much stronger.
2. We won't be flying again this week / for 6 months / ever again as nuclear winter will fall and human extinction is a certainty. Or global cooling. Or global warming.
3. We can't fly safely / KLM and Lufthansa have been flying safely. My favourite is the 'successful' flight by a Urals flight which flew very well towards Italy, apart from running out of fuel and having to land at Vienna. Personally, I see this as Not A Good Thing aeronautically although it may have been A Good Thing sachertorte and kaffee wise for the crew.

So, as one in a million stranded people, how do I feel? I'm pretty certain I won't be seeing Manchester airport any time on Tuesday or Wednesday. I'm a wee bit concerned that Easyjet flights will resume and I'll be on the flight which discovers that the choke mechanism ( check my wholly absent knowledge of avionics) doesn't work. And we're on the world's heaviest glider.

This leads to the favoured conversation of the stranded: how else we could get home? My Dad is an acknowledged demagogue in this field and has provided a host of practical, sensible and cost-effective measures:
1. as Nick Clegg did well in the Leader's debate and we aren't going to get the Tories as the next government, he's never going back to the UK and is going to buy an apartment here as he likes the lamb. (He lives in Portugal but never mind).
2. We'll get to Venice by boat and catch the Orient Express back, I much prefer this to,
3. As Easyjet passengers we should get the Easycruise boat to come and get us. 'Unfortunately' as flights are grounded I doubt we'll get great onboard entertainment such as the Vengaboys. Quoits maybe. Or
4. Fly but at the moment we enter the ash cloud turn the engines off and we can glide. He assures me that a Canadian plane glided 400nm over the Atlantic to make a safe landing on the Azores with a mere 12 exploded wheels. Just one of the many times I wish he wasn't addicted to Black Box Recorder on Nat Geo.

So, for the foreseeable future I'm taking it easy like Sunday morning on my sunlounger (whilst obsessively checking Twitter).

Yamas!


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Location:Malia,Greece

Dunkirk Spirit

So clearly everyone would love the opportunity to have an extra week's holiday at the end of their booked break, wouldn't they? Well, actually it's not all that it's cracked up to be.

Firstly, you know everything back home resents you and imagines you sat by your hotel pool, Pina Colada to hand, languidly rubbing in more tanning lotion. The reality is that you spend hours of each day obsessively checking Twitter (@eurocontrol) and www.nats.co.uk to see what airspace has closed now. Between times you check the news websites and Facebook to speak to other stranded people.

Secondly, being abroad stops being agreeably romantic and exciting and becomes foreign to you in the most upsetting sense of the word. You've eaten all the local specialities by now and frankly you want to make your own dinner in your own house. Your hotel bed just isn't your own bed. You've visited all the major attractions and you're ready to pop home, have a cup of tea and upload the thinnest and most tanned pics to Facebook. It was lovely a week ago but now? Home is where the heart is.

Thirdly, and this is the killer, you want to go to work. Yes, I know it sounds nonsensical but you feel guilty for letting your colleagues down. I'm pretty convinced I won't be paid for the days that I'm absent but it's my reputation I fear for most. Am I hereafter always going to be the employee who can't be trusted to turn up for work after Easter?I moan about my job sometimes and I certainly get that Sunday night feeling but deep down I'd like to be at work on Monday, joking that I should have missed my flight home, rather than having missed my flight home.

It's an odd feeling being a hostage to fortune. I'm really lucky to be in a nice apartment and able to afford food etc until I can transit home: and I'm aware of people kipping at airports and I know how lucky I am. I also know people whose dream holidays have been cancelled and who are devastated. I'm in as fortunate a position as it is possible to be. But secretly, I just want to go home. I've come to understand Dunkirk spirit: it's not about the heroic rescue, it's about getting home and popping the kettle on. Whenever that might be.



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Location:Παλαιά Εθνική Οδός Ηρακλείου,Malia,Greece