The Traveling Years by Leo Eaton

Author:Leo Eaton [Leo Eaton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: THE TRAVELING YEARS
Published: 2016-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

WANDERLUST

I returned to London and the Central Office of Information but after working there for a year, I was starting to get wanderlust again. We’d already been in London much longer than we’d originally planned. While Jeri would happily have stayed longer, she wasn’t averse to a new adventure so she and I began discussing where we might go next. Although my novel A Small Fantasy was finished, I now knew it was only the first book in a trilogy. Agent Robert Mills didn’t like the manuscript and said it wouldn’t sell but I had the story for all three books in my head and wanted to keep moving forward. I wanted to be a full time writer again, not just a filmmaker writing in my spare time.

On one of those bleak February days when the damp follows you inside buildings and daylight seems to last only a couple of hours around lunchtime, Jeri called and told me to be sure to get home early. There was a program on television she thought we should watch. Called Spirit of Place, it followed writer Lawrence Durrell back to Corfu, revisiting all the places he’d lived as a young man. Jeri and I were captivated. When it was over, we looked at each other and said together: “Greece!”

Jeri’s parents were coming over from America to visit that summer and suggested we take a vacation together. We again said “Greece” and the four of us flew into Athens in early May. We decided to plan nothing ahead of time; we’d just “go to Greece” and if Greece wanted us to live there, she’d make us welcome and give us a wonderful vacation.

That’s just what happened. We rented a car and wandered north through Delphi before turning south and west again to arrive in the port of Patras. We decided an island might be nice so boarded the first ferry to leave and three hours later docked at Argostoli on Cephalonia, an island later made famous by the book and film Corelli’s Mandolin.

We stayed in the tiny fishing village of Fiscardo on the north tip of the island where we met two couples who would again set our lives on a new course. First was Athanasia and Giorgio who owned the only taverna in Fiscardo where we ate most of our meals. With true Greek hospitality, they treated us like family and introduced us to the warmth and generosity of a Greek village community. Their friendship was the first sign that Greece would welcome us.

Next we met Star and Kali, a young American couple who had previously walked from Ireland, spending more than a year on the road, stopping off to work at odd jobs whenever they needed money. They lived alone in an abandoned Venetian lighthouse and were totally self-sufficient, growing the vegetables they ate and collecting rainwater for drinking and washing in a centuries-old cistern below the lighthouse.

Three months earlier Kali had given birth to Pleiada, a beautiful baby girl, with no outside assistance.

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