It was on my birthday! On a sunny December day, we finally got at Marina Di Ragusa in Sicily after traveling for 2 days by car from Volos, Greece! When we left from Toronto, we shipped to Greece 11 boxes of our “we cannot live without” things (which surprisingly comprised mainly of books and tools) and we carried a total of 6 suitcases (3 each) with us by plane with all our cloths and absolutely necessary stuff! So basically, the sum of all the things that 2 individuals who have a combined age of a full century, fit in 11 boxes and 6 suitcases! Excluding real property that was sold or rented out, it was astonishing to realize that we could reduce (in both number and volume) all the necessary things we need in our lives, so they could fit in the limited space of our 53 ft new floating home/boat! even more amazing was that the 6 suitcases were all discarded in Greece where we loaded all their contents in an Audi A4, model of 2000 old car which we drove to Sicily!
Given that Jeff is Canadian and I am Greek-Canadian, there are cultural differences that keep us always busy trying to communicate to each other where our references come from in any given discussion topic which strays from the universally familiar intellectual realm into the widely different and unfamiliar area of experiences gained growing up in our respective environments. Now, why was this clarification so necessary that it took almost and entire paragraph to relate above…? because I think I was trying for 3 days in a row to familiarize Jeff with “Sport Billie”! When I was growing up, I remember this comic that I used to love reading where the hero was Sport Billie and his little friend Sport Lillie. The two of them got into a lot of extraordinary adventures but the one amazing thing in the comic was that Sport Billie used to have a little magic sports bag that could fit in there literally everything regardless of size: from a little baseball to an entire gymnasium full with all the equipment! Kinda like Mary Poppins’ bag but instead of mirrors and lamps, the sports bag had all the things related to sports, hence the name Sport Billie! Anyway, the reference was that the car was like Sport Billie’s magic sports bag that could fit in it everything.
I can now declare from my own experience, that an Amel Super Maramu 2000 sail boat has enough space to store 11 boxes and 6 suitcases of things so comfortably that half the boats’ storage compartments were still empty! Fighting off Jeff’s first impulse to fill up all the boats’ free space with bottles of beer and circumventing successfully Jeff’s plan to set up a distillery so we do not run out of booze (one of the essential necessities in life!) we now have stored our things and provisions (and a reasonable amount of alcohol) very comfortably and I am pretty sure we can live on the boat for at least a few weeks without running out of food. I love our boat!
Adventures on Spruzzo 