Today it’s the 21st June and Paulette’s 60th birthday – the reason we are all here in Greece. It’s a coincidence that Tsachi had his birthday on the same day – but its not a major birthday this year.

We started our outing today by driving through the town of Vourkari just north of us to the archaeological ruins of Arya Irina from 3200BC.

There are the remains of many stone houses but there is no info and we couldn’t get into the area – only look through the fence. There seemed to be bits of a large underwater jetty in the sheltered bay.

Of course a church has been plonked on the top of the site – maybe originally a temple.

This town is famous for trading very high quality pottery. It also had a cult of pottery statues of women with large breast’s dancing – as we saw in the museum 2 days ago.

After a good look we continued to walk towards lighthouse. We arrived at the dip in the land where in 1805 the ships commander Lambros Katsonis escaped from the Turkish by rolling his ship over logs with pork fat to get out of the bay.

We continued our walk to the lighthouse. There were great views over a very rough sea.

We arrived at the lighthouse and found a group of people locking up the door. They were leaving. They were members of the Greek navy who are able to use the lighthouse as a holiday house – and they were changing over with new arrivals.

We then headed back to the car.

We then moved north to Otsiaz beach to find a good cafe for coffee. When we arrived the owner was very friendly and recognised Tsachi as having a Greek background. We also told the owner it was Tsachi’s birthday – and he brought out a free cake.

After being full caffeinated we went for a swim at the nice sandy beach opposite. It was a lovely spot to get into the sea with beautiful clear water. We enjoyed the cool down before heading on towards lunch – its a hard life on holiday on a Greek island!

On the way we were able to visit the famous statue the Lion of Kea created in 800bc. We parked in the carpark and had a hike of half a kilometer. When we arrived there the statue was much larger than expected – 9 metres long. It was supposedly carved after the water nymphs had been scared away from Kea by a lion sent by jealous gods. The island became much drier. The locals carved an image of the lion to appease the gods to try to get the water back. I dont think it worked.

The town of Ioulis was just across the valley.

The next stop was lunch at a nice taverna Tsachi had spotted yesterday on the road. It was very lovely with a nice shady terrace. We shared a very delicious soft white cheese pie with honey.

We also had giant beans and Glenn ordered pasticcio and ended up with a huge slab enough for 4. We tried not to eat too much as we were going out for the birthday dinner that night.

After lunch we went back to the hotel to rest and tidy up.

We first had drinks at the hotel on the terrace – very civilised.

We then headed along to the restaurant Nisos where there was a bit of chaos with 2 ferries going out. There were people and cars everywhere. Its Sunday night so many Athens people are going back after the weekend.

We started off with a bottle of French champagne as a toast to the birthdays.

We then had another big meal including cod balls with skordalia and tuna kebab followed by hot halva with semolina – a bit of a strange dessert.

It was a beautiful memorable dinner – and thank you very much to Mike for hosting us all.