April 14: Paros: Naoussa

I woke around 8:00am. After a bit of faffing about in my room, I went down to the poolside bar, where the hotel's owner, Nikos, had told me there would be breakfast. Nikos's wife, Astrid, a lovely German woman, showed me how to use the coffee maker (one of those pod things). Nikos asked if I wanted a cheese omelette and I said "Yes, please!" and a few minutes later he brough a lovely freshly-made omelette to the table for me.

I didn't linger long over breakfast because it was Friday and I needed to do some work. I went back to my room, had a Zoom meeting with my colleague to review the features that had been added to the latest release, and then started to write the release documentation. Unfortunately, the battery on my laptop kept draining, despite being plugged in. I tried plugging in to different sockets, restarting, etc. but nothing worked. I finally did a hard shutdown and plugged my laptop into the same socket I had used to charge my phone. I researched the issue using my phone and mentally started making plans to drive to the nearest computer shop if it didn't charge.

There wasn't anything I could do about the laptop, so I decided to drive into Naoussa and have a walk around. I used my phone and Google Maps to research the route and parking, said a prayer, and drove off. The road into Naoussa was quite good, but the minute I turned into Naoussa the road narrowed and I was eventually into a warren of narrow, one-way residential streets. I popped out onto the main road as expected, though, and parallel parked about 150m down the road. It was busy - clearly I wasn't the only person visiting Naoussa that afternoon - so I was lucky to find parking. Feeling accomplished with my driving, I happily walked into the village.

The village of Naoussa is one of those picture-perfect Cyclaedic villages with narrow, pedestrian-only lanes between white-washed buildings. The mortar around the cobblestones is painted white, giving the lanes an almost artisistic feeling. People still live in Naoussa, but mostly on the second floor of the buildings. The ground floor spaces are usually converted to shops.

I walked up and down the lanes, dodging the other tourists and occassionally popping into shops, for an hour or so. Most of the shops sell the same touristy stuff - scarves, handbags, pottery, jewellery. The sun was beating down when I popped out of the lanes into the harbour. Naoussa has a working harbour full of fishing boats and nets and octopus drying in the sun. There are also a bunch of tour boats and the odd private boat. I walked around the harbour admiring the boats for another 30 minutes or so.

The sun was beating down and I was starting to feel fried so I found a restaurant where there was a semi-shaded single table (it's hard to find shaded single tables since the sun shades are usually reserved for the more profitable 4-top and 6-top tables). I had a water, a beer, and fries and enjoyed the hustle-bustle of the harbour.

When I had recovered from the sun, I walked back to the car and drove back to the hotel. Getting out of Naoussa was a lot easier than getting in and I had a pleasurable drive.

I went for a swim in the pool - it felt Arctic after the heat of the day - then had a hot shower, did some laundry in the sink, and had a quiet night in my room.