The reality of long-term travel is you still need to deal with daily chores and some are made exceedingly difficult depending on your access to “modern conveniences”. After 10 days of travel, I thought I would write a little about how we are living regular life while still enjoying island paradise life.

When we sold our house last month, we also sold our car, washing machine, dishwasher, and packed up our fully equipped kitchen with knives, vegetable peelers, pots, pans and cutting boards. And we miss those things every day. 🙂 Since we are planning on traveling for 12 months continuously, we are on a budget. That means we try to shop at grocery stores and cook at “home” when possible, take the bus or walk instead of renting a car or taking a taxi everywhere, and sometimes find ourselves washing the clothes in two pots in the shower. Which is what happened this week once we realised that our accommodation had no washing machine and there was no laundromat on the island. After asking some locals, we found out that for €20-25/load a hotel would wash/dry/iron everything. Which, when adding in the cost of the taxi to/from the hotel which would have doubled the price per load, was out of our comfort zone. So for €4.50 we picked up some detergent and clothespins at the local mini-mart and got to work.

As for choosing grocery stores over expensive restaurants, we don’t always go that route but rather try to mix it up between eating in our accommodation, grabbing some food on the go and sitting down in a nice restaurant. I am an unenthusiastic cook and the kids have simple taste (noodles with butter and cheese will happily fill all four bellies up on any given day), so we usually do basic meals at home. Although I do not like to cook, I do like to pursue grocery stores around the world. I love the challenge of figuring out what is what, what is the same as home, and what local delicacies are available. I do feel like you can learn a lot about a culture by spending time at the local grocery store or farmer’s market. So on this trip we have had plenty of plates of pasta at home and plenty of trips to the mini-mart in the village (they know our kids by now!) and a few trips through the supermarket in town (a 10 minute bus ride away) to see what we can try and what is a familiar flavour.

When we go out to eat, we try to have meals that focus more on the local cuisine (though you can also often find us at a pizza place as well), so we’ve had some terrific meals of moussaka, souvlaki and Greek salad. There is a small bakery in the village where we are staying that had some tasty treats that are budget friendly, especially when you buy one or two and cut it up so everyone can have a taste. And we have enjoyed some fabulous views at the restaurants we’ve visited so far!

Lastly, transportation is a big adjustment for us and something I try to think about as I book places, but I don’t always think everything through. It’s a learning process. 😉 In Athens, I knew we would be making frequent trips to the airport so I picked someplace close by. What I forgot to look at was if there was a local bus so we ended up spending a lot of money on transfer services through the apartment rental. Luckily, there was a great beach within walking distance! On the first island I made sure we were walking distance from restaurants since we did not have a kitchen, and we were able to take a local bus to a beach. But that did involve quite a bit of walking in hot weather. On the current island, there is a great local bus from the port (where we arrived and where a bigger town is with more restaurants, grocery stores and other services) to the old village (where we are staying) and some services within walking distance. But any place we want to visit involves a lot of walking, up hills, in the heat. And much of the island is not accessible by bus. So we did decide to rent a car for the second week and took a taxi home from the beach one afternoon. We want to stay in budget but we also want the trip to be a pleasant experience overall!