Category: holidays

We ended up altering our original plans for our trip to Greece a fair amount because of COVID-19. We had originally scheduled to take the train from Aachen to Frankfurt on Monday, spend the night there, and then fly out of Frankfurt Tuesday morning. After Frankfurt got classified as a risk area, we no longer had any desire to hang out in downtown Frankfurt, so instead we just got up at 4 a.m. on Tuesday and drove 2.5 hours to the airport. Clare was nice enough to drive.

Our itinerary in Greece also changed. We had booked a flight from Athens to Naxos on Tuesday afternoon, which was cancelled, which meant that we had to stay one night in Athens and take the flight on Wednesday morning. We decided not to stay directly in Athens, but closer to the airport, and ended up in a gigantic villa (for a ridiculously cheap price). The kids really loved it (even though there was no wifi). Luckily we had brought a little bit of food with us, because it was pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Clare tried to find a grocery store while the kids and I went swimming, but didn’t have any luck. So we had a dinner of plain noodles with oil, salt, pepper, and oregano. Spencer added peanut butter to his, and discovered that it was quite tasty, so we also followed suit.

2020 Easter is not like most others, but we managed to make it as nice as we could. In particular Meg went out of her way to try to make it as nice as possible with lots of decorations, and she even came up with some fun games for us. She hung up some candies from our loft, which we had to jump and touch, in order to get them. We also had a race trying to hold easter eggs on a spoon. Meg was the only one who didn’t drop the egg.

We also kept up some old traditions, in particular making hot cross buns. Meg helped a bunch. She has been practicing making pizza dough the last couple months, and she is getting pretty good at kneading. We are lucky that we had enough flour and yeast, which have been hard to find during the Corona-virus crisis. We also lucked out with the weather. It has been sunny and around 70 F all week long. We enjoyed our Easter dinner of ham, green beans, and potato dumplings on the balcony.

While Clare were doing the wine tasting on Monday, we asked the honeymooning couple what their favorite thing was in Sorrento, and they said taking a boat tour of Capri. This hadn’t really been on our list before, but we decided to try it, and indeed it was one of the favorites of everyone. It was one of the most expensive things we did, but it was worth it. The boat ride was very relaxing. It left from the port just a 2 minute walk from our apartment, the guide was great, the weather was beautiful, and seeing the coast of Sorrento and of Capri up close from a small boat is surely the best way to enjoy its beauty. Capri itself was not that interesting to us. We enjoyed a nice pizza lunch near the harbor, searched for the funicular to the top of the island for 20 minutes, finally found it, and then just did some souvenir shopping.

Sunday morning we slept in and had a lazy morning. After the long day of traveling on Saturday, we planned to simply relax and hang out at the beach. We decided to go to the private beach right by our apartment. We were worried it would be expensive, but it turned out to be only 2€ per adult; the kids were free. Whenever I told one of my colleagues at work we were going to Italy in October, they said it would be too cold. I think what they really meant, was that it would not be too hot. The water was a little chilly, but refreshing.

We spent several hours at the beach in the morning, then came back in for awhile for lunch. After some relaxation, we took the elevator up the cliff to the botanical garden to see the sunset. They also have a free museum there, with some Roman art they have discovered in the area. The sunset was very beautiful. They also had a large checkers and chess board, which we enjoyed.

After we enjoyed the beautiful sunset, we headed back to the elevator. As we were getting on, a man was getting out with some takeout pizza which smelled wonderful, and even though we had already eaten dinner, we suddenly had hunger again. We stopped at the restaurant right across from our apartment to get some takeout pizzeria margherita. We discovered that the waitress there lives in the same building we were staying in, and we were happy to support the ultra-local economy. The pizza was not quite as good as the one we had in Naples, but for 4€, it is hard to complain.