Hayden and Chelsea Depart

Tuesday the 24^th has arrived and it’s time to send our passengers home. After four days in Castellammare di Golf, the Tara crew is getting wanderlust. While the town is very nice, it’s also pretty basic without the water sports (beach) needed to keep our crew interested.

We got up early – I think it’s the first time I’ve seen Hayden before noon, we had a nice breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast (our toaster works when we have shore-power going) and we watched the two visitors pack the final things into their bags.

A quick tearful goodbye on the dock with a lot of pictures taken by our new Dutch friend Joost and we were ready to go. Chelsea wanted to get a picture with the North Shore News … where travellers often send pictures with the NSN in them to get published in the paper. Clearly she doesn’t know about the immense following we already have in the blogosphere :-P.

We piled into our Fiat Punto – that struggled to make it up a 10% grade with the four of us and the bags … I had to push the clutch in, rev the motor, get some wheelspin so the revs advanced above 2000 where there was at least some torque available. Typical Italian engine, lots of revs – 4500 on the highway at 125kph and no torque at 1500 – very different than what we have in Canada.

We found the airport thanks to our Garmin GPS and the two of them checked in (different parts of the airport naturally). We walked them up to Security and gave them a quick hug and off they went. Hayden’s routing was Palermo – Munich – Montreal – Vancouver, arriving 10pm Tuesday. Chelsea had a more scenic route: Palermo – Rome – Frankfurt – London – Vancouver and she’ll arrive sometime next home week.

Sometimes it is hard to believe that they can make it 6,000 miles in about the same time it takes us to go 60 miles … but that’s about the difference in speed … Now we’re on our spring to Greece, across the top of Sicily, then up the boot of Italy on the eastern side, then to Albania for a couple of days and finally into Corfu. If all goes as planned we should arrive there in the first couple of days of August.