Relationship

3 adventurous moms, 7 children and 2 months in Greece set the tone of my life and gave me the mistake of traveling

Thanks to my mom, I have an adventurous spirit, and I KNOW without a doubt that I can do whatever I want in life. She gave me the gift of an open mind and an adventurous spirit. The first really clear memory is from when I was seven, but my mom has always done adventurous things like this …

When I was seven, my mother and two of her friends decided to go to Greece for a week. They signed up for Greek classes and started studying. But they soon realized that a week would be too short considering all the effort they were putting into the trip. So they increased it to two weeks … but what about the 7 children ????

The answer, of course, was “Let’s take them too, but let’s go for two MONTHS”. So we left in the summer of 1976, took the last month out of school and planted some pumpkin seeds in the garden before we left. The three parents couldn’t take that much time off from work, so the poor stayed home and sailed the Great Lakes.

I remember that trip so clearly and what strikes me now is how I thought it was normal. Children are very adaptable and what you teach through your actions becomes part of them. Therefore, the travel worm was ingrained in me, as was the adventurous spirit.

We spent a few days in Athens in a hotel, then we took an overnight ferry to Crete, where we spent the full two months. We lived in a boarding house with a single mother and her two children, Nicos and Nifoula, who rented us three rooms for $ 2.50 a night per room. We had many adventures during our stay, we became friends with the locals and played with the local children. I learned some Greek and crawled through the sewers of Knosses.

But an adventure really stands out … Donkey Island (or so we called it WE even though there were no donkeys there). I’m not sure how it all happened, but the 3 moms somehow arranged for some fishermen to take us out to sea, drop us off on a desert island, and come back for us in the morning on their return trip.

I remember they left me and I thought “What if they don’t come back?” We had a packed lunch for dinner and our sleeping bags and that was it. There was not a single person, building or road on that island. We explored, had a picnic, and slept next to each other in our bags on the beach, looking for shooting stars until we fell asleep.

In the morning the fishermen came back and made us an eel soup for breakfast. I wasn’t sure about eating eels at first, but it was the most delicious soup I’ve ever had to this day. It was a light soup like a soup with an intense lemon flavor … cooked fresh from the sea and eaten barefoot in paradise.

When we returned to Canada in early August, our backyard was covered in pumpkins and I had a new perspective on life, although I didn’t realize it at the time. That experience opened more doors for me in the years to come and, looking back, I have my mother to thank for my adventurous spirit and the fact that thinking outside the box is normal for me.