Best Kefalonia adveture EVER!

So far this has been my favorite day of this trip. Get comfy folks - because this is going to be a long post! :)

We scheduled one day to rent a car (unfortunately it wasn't a SMART car which are just SO cute) and drive up to the village my grandfather was born in. We stayed in the capitol city, Argostoli because it was basically one of the only hotels open. It was eerie, kind of like being on Nantucket in December. You could tell that it's really only a vibrant summer place, but at the same time there is something to be said for visiting a place like this in the off season.

Kefalonia is a fairly big island and there are a lot of things we wanted to do. We didn't get to do all of them, although we certainly got up early enough. Apparently, in our vacation mode, we forgot about daylight savings :p so we thought we were waking up at 7 but it was another clock mix up and we were up at 6AM! Classic.

We got a map and headed up to Farsa. The drive was beautiful - and because Dave is going nuts with the camera we borrowed from Katie, we were stopping to take pictures every couple hundred feet it seemed. Dave is certainly in vacation tourist mode.

We found Farsa pretty easily, luckily my new hubby is a wiz at directions.
If you look at the bottom of this sign you can see Farsa.



My cousins had given us a little map of how to find the cemetery. Funny story, cemetery in Greek is "Necrophitia" NOT "NecrophiLia" ;) Luckily I made that mistake while talking to my cousin, not to a stranger.

I went into this little taverna and in my broken Greek asked the 12 year old girl who was tending bar (only in Greece!) how to find the cemetery. We walked down the road and thankfully the cemetery was open. Before my PaPou died, during one of his last trips to Greece, he took pictures of himself standing next to his parent's graves. I wanted to visit that same site, so my cousins wrote down my great grandparent's names in Greek and we used that to help us find the graves. We found something that looked like "Voutsinas" but it didn't have the "S" on the end and was spelled slightly differently - so we kept looking. As we were looking an older gentleman came in, who didn't speak any English. Dave asked him if he could help us, using gestures and a few Greek words. :) He helped us find the grave (it WAS the one that was spelled a little differently) and we got the pictures I wanted. :)







My great grandparents were Spiros and Theadora Voutsinas (Theadora is my mother's namesake). There was also another grave next to it, it was smaller and seemed to possibly contain a child - it was the Voutsinas name but we couldn't figure out who it was. I'm hoping Mom will read this and tell us who it was. :) The other picture is Dave getting all creative with the Digital SLR....boys and their toys!



Here's a picture of the old man who helped us around, we discovered his name was Yannis(Greek for John) and that either he or maybe his parents knew my great grandparents well. He was really nice and also offered to show us around Old Farsa, the old village that was abandoned many years ago.



Seeing as it was our one week anniversary, I decided to test Dave's love for me by making him drive up the "road of death". Thankfully, we all survived and so did our marriage. ;) You know a man really loves you when he he drives up a mountain on an old dirt/gravel road filled with narrow switchbacks, in a Hyundai on a "road" just barely big enough for a small car, with an old man who doesn't speak any English just so that his wife can see where her grandfather grew up. :) This is the road we drove up.



We also thought it was kind of funny how "inventive" the Greeks in the little towns are. For the "fences" they basically combine anything that can be used to wall off a section. The one we passed on the "road of death" contained among other things: an ironing board, bed headboard & footboards, a ladder, mattress framing & springs, old wire racks from a store, etc.



To be continued.....

(edited for humor by Dave)