More homesickness. But this time, the regular kind.

It’s ok, it’s not as bad as the title makes it out to be. I just think I’d trade this lonely hotel room in Iraklio for some home time right now. And I know that in a couple of days I’ll be back to living it up abroad, but for now I’m going to be a little homesick. And I’m ok with that.

Yesterday was quite possibly the hardest day of my life. Looking at it now, I’m pretty happy that I’ve never had to deal with worse, as everything turned out to be ok. I set off from the hostel in Rethymno just after 10 to catch the bus to Iraklio, where I planned on visiting Knossos. Mom gave me her iPod Touch before I left, and on it I’ve got my Twitter stream. There isn’t any wifi at the bus station, but I had a glance at the cached stream as I boarded the bus and I saw something that made my heart skip a beat.

SamirInVancity: Huge earthquake in Chile. Trying to look up more info.

Mom and dad are in Chile. I immediately think the worst. But the bus is leaving, and I don’t what to do, so I sit frozen in my seat as it departs. It’s an hour and a half to Rethymno, but it felt like an eternity. I’m going back and forth between calm and cool and collected, and choking on tears. Finally we get to the bus station and I get an internet connection. No messages from mom or dad or Will, but there’s plenty about it in the news.

8.8 magnitude on the Richter scale.

That is unbelievable.

Some people don’t know how the Richter scale works, so here’s some background:

Each point on the scale (e.g. 4.0 or 5.0 or 6.0) is TEN TIMES more powerful than the point before. So imagine that in miles: if a 7.0 were worth 70 miles an hour, an 8.0 would be 700mph. You go from average highway speeds to NEARLY BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER in just a single point.

That’s why lots of 4 and 5 Richter quakes are reported with minimal to no damage, and sometimes no one even feels them. Get to a 6 or a 7 and you start to hear horror stories about bridges collapsing, buildings toppling over, and ridiculous tsunamis. And people dying.

8.8.

I get my shit together enough to convey to the poor woman working at the kiosk that I’d like a phone card. I call mom’s cell. Voicemail. Dad’s cell. Voicemail. It’s around 7am in Santiago at this point, so I somehow interpret this to mean it’s 7am in Vancouver. It was actually 2am. Oops. Call the house. No answer. Call Will’s cell. No answer. Leave a myriad of teary desperate voicemails asking everyone to email me as soon as they hear anything.

So now it’s noon and I’m standing in a parking lot freaking out. I obviously can’t go look at old shit for two hours so I reluctantly board the return bus to Rethymno. The iPod’s running out of juice and I know it might be hours/days until I hear something from mom and dad. Cue another 1.5 hour sobbing bus ride.

The next ten+ hours are me keeping vigil at my computer in the hostel, religiously refreshing my email in the hopes that there is news. I venture out a few times to try making calls but still no answer all around. Finally I get to talk to Will, who sounds as concerned as I am but did a wonderful job of calming me down a bit. He promises to email me as soon as he hears anything (as there’s no phone to call me at), and I reluctantly hang up.

The hostel managers, Ivan and Elena, were so sweet in trying to calm my nerves, and they invited me to a second dinner. (Seriously, best value hostel ever! 10 Euros a night and twice they fed me amazing dinners that would have cost at least that much had I eaten at a restaurant instead.) Afterwards, it’s tea and chocolate and more constant refreshing. I’m also worsening my worst fears by reading all the news, watching the death toll rise, and looking at all the pictures. Not the best situation to be in.

After dinner I hear from Hilary, and her and auntie Dar are on the case.

[I wisely stopped writing at this point to venture out of the lonely hotel room to find a bar that would air the gold medal men’s hockey game, and the rest of the night was spent drinking and cheering with my six Greek husbands – more about that later. I’m now wrapping this up the next day, Monday, in Santorini.]

Sometime around midnight I see the Best News Ever on Facebook. Mom posted:

We r on way to Lima. Whole of Chile shut down.

So after crying all day out of worry, I’m now bawling my eyes out, this time out of relief. The whole ordeal made me realize just how much I love and admire and adore my parents, and that I’m not going to be ready to say goodbye to them for at least another hundred and fifty years or so.

I finally get to bed well after 1am after 14 of the most emotionally exhaustive hours of my life. I felt like I had run a marathon, or at least I guess that’s a comparable feeling, as I will never be foolish enough to run one.

I probably should have slept all day after all that emotional turmoil, but I was up at 8 to shower, pack and head to the bus station, this time with all my stuff as I was planning on catching the ferry to Santorini last night.

I leave my bags at luggage storage and catch the local bus to Knossos. I was in a crappy mood going in, redeemed only slightly by the lack of entry fee as I was there on a Sunday, and Knossos was an epic disappointment. I almost wish I had paid the entrance fee so that I could have demanded a refund.

Knossos’ mantra should basically be “We had some really cool stuff here dating as far back as 1900BC, but then around 1908AD this dude named Arthur Evan came here with way too much money and ambition, and overhauled the entire site, claiming it was a restoration when it was really a creation of what his vivid imagination could come up with, and although we don’t really agree with his view and the work that he did we can’t really be bothered to undo it, so this is what you get, and by the way, everything that was actually original is now living elsewhere in museums so here are a bunch of replicas in their place.”

Sometimes I love run-on sentences.

So now we’ve got a day of emotional turmoil, a late night, an early morning, and the only thing I was looking forward to all day was a disappointment.

I salvage some of the remaining afternoon though, as I had a few hours to kill until my ferry was to depart, and I manage to find the 400-plus-year-old lion found in Iraklio’s town square. I also went to Fyllos…Sofies, as recommended by my Lonely Planet book, and tried their delicious bougatsa. Bougatsa is a cheese and pastry dish, and the version I had was topped with honey and cinnamon. An impressive, and probably not that difficult to make, dessert that I need to learn how to recreate when I get home.

Venture back down to the bus station, collect my bags from luggage storage, and I walk over to the port to board my ferry to Santorini. It was scheduled to leave at 6:20, and I’m there nearly an hour early. I don’t see the vessel. Head to the ticket counter to inquire and I find out that the ferry is stuck in Rhodes due to inclement weather and won’t be in port til at least the morning. He gives me 8am as a general timeframe for expected departure.

I’m now stuck in Iraklio, and my lovely €10 a night hostel is an hour and a half away by bus. A return trip ticket will cost me over €12, not to mention three hours of my time, and I have no idea if I’d make it back in time in the morning to catch the ferry.

I consult my LP guidebook and find a hotel that offers rooms with shared bathrooms for as low as €35/night. Perfect! Try calling them via payphone but I keep getting some weird disconnected noise. It’s not that far, so I set off, bags and backpack in tow, for the hotel.

It’s closed. That would explain the weird disconnected noise I got when I tried calling them. There’s a hotel next door, and I venture in. There’s room, but it’s €50/night. Ouch.

I venture back out, and have a look at what else is recommended by LP. There are other options as cheap as €40/night, but for the most part everything in Iraklio is expensive, which is why I wasn’t staying there in the first place. Nothing is nearby on the map, and it’s not uncommon for places to close in the offseason (I guess that they don’t realize that if they lowered their prices to something reasonable for backpackers that they’d have a full house all winter long), so I give up and go back to the €50/night place.

I’m still averaging well below the $100/day that so many people suggest as a backpacking budget, so it’s not as bad of a gouge as I’m making it out to be. I was tired and cranky and didn’t want to spend an hour and a half on a bus to save €20.

Cue sadness. I miss my parents after worrying so much, and even though they aren’t there, I was still thinking it would have been so nice to deal with all the worry at home, where I had Jack and Will and a phone to use at my disposal. Everyone at home is enjoying what is probably the biggest party that Vancouver will ever see, and I’ve started to regret being away for the Olympics. I know I’ll never ever ever regret travelling, and I couldn’t really have waited until post-Olympics, nor could I have cut my trip short. But couple all the craziness back home that I’m missing out on with my slight regret at being in Greece now (it would have been a million times more amazing in the summer), and I admit it: I miss home.

I’m missing a lot more than the Olympics, too. I’m missing my best friend’s wedding. Now I don’t in any way fault myself for that, as I’d already booked my tickets and she moved the date to when I was gone, but it’s still a little heartbreaking. This would have been the first time I’d have been a bridesmaid, and I was so pumped to help with bachelorette party and bridal shower planning. But hey, it’s Reyna’s big day, not mine, and she’s entitled to have it whatever day she wants. If I can’t be there, well, c’est la vie.

I’m missing the birthdays of three of my favourite people: dad, Nicole and Jenn. And Jenn’s birthday is St Patrick’s Day, so I’m missing that too. To be fair, had I been home I’d have missed her birthday celebration anyway, as she’s having her fete the same day as Reyna’s wedding, but it still sucks being away for all this.

Travel is (mostly) carefree, but the fact that I’ll be home in less than a month (30 days exactly) is starting to loom in the back of my head. And while I do miss lots of stuff about home, being home means responsibility, starting with jobhunting, which is my least favourite thing to do on the planet. I’ll be excited about whatever new job I land when I get it, but the interim is the worst part.
Regardless of my semi-homesickness, this is still nothing like how homesick I was when I was in Italy in 2006. I’m proud of how stable and independent I’ve been. Travelling solo is not nearly as terrifying as I’d have ever expected, and I think it’s something I’d do again if I can’t find a travel buddy the next time I want to go somewhere.

Big thanks to Dan for making my travel dream a reality. I wish you were here to see my photos and hear my stories. Miss you.