Winter Begins with Memories of Albania and Greece

As the first snowflakes come whipping around the house, mostly horizontally, 

I can accept that our extended Autumn is now ending. 

Quite the gift of Mother Nature to allow me, after my late return: enough time to finish up 

in the gardens, prepare our yard and house for winter, and even plant some daffodils. 

Maja e Kendrevicës, Albania. Mount Cika is behind.

Since it's a cold day, and the chickens are snacking on some warming seeds 

and the rabbit babies are tucked in their makeshift nest, 

I thought I'd finally share some of the summer. 

Corfu!

The routing is pretty similar when flying to four of our destinations in Greece, 

all on the Ionian Sea: Corfu, Prevesa, Araxos and Zakinthos. 

Spellings of Greek places varies through Europe, 

which is fair, I guess, since the greek alphabet is different than ours. 

Did you know in Bulgaria almost everyone is versed in three languages, all

closely related, but with slightly different alphabets similar to the greek alphabet. 

That's what a Bulgarian told me, anyway. 

Albania, near Sarande, looking north.

I don't spend much time thinking of Albania, but when I do 

I see the mountains that form the desolate area of the hide outs of the enemy in 'Taken'. 

As you can see there is also plenty of farm land. 

It's quite green in the lower areas. 

Can you see Kerkira airport?
Airports are sometimes quite tough to see even without clouds in the way!
Knowing the surface's orientation is one trick to locating it. 

Albania is only a couple kilometres from Corfu, so don't forget about it! 

Or Macedonia, where "Kaliméra" isn't kosher, 

(instead try "Dobro utro" - whoa doesn't that have some similarity to Polish??) 

but the controllers kindly do put up with our collective pilot ignorance. 

In Albanian it's "Miremengjes", in case you need it! 

Which you DO, since you're Canadian; courteous and worldly.

The north end of the island of Corfu. Don't you just want to take a dip?

Very kindly, a colleague friend of mine lent me his long lens for the same camera body I have. 

I won't say I got the hang of it, because I didn't (my heart's art remains stuck on close-up 

and portraits, I suppose) but, it does allow observation of more detail. 

So, thank you Nigel!

The border between Albania and Greece: See the first hill directly on the shoreline?
The border cuts east (left in this case) from the innermost part of the bay 'above' it. 

Aktion airport is a military aerodrome, near the city of Preveza.
We are just backtracking to depart from the threshold of 07L. The elevation is 3 feet lower than YVR, at 11'!

 I need a bit of a rest from all the physical labour over the last month. 

Any back stretches anyone can recommend? 

I believe stretching would be more helpful than massage, though who could say no to a kneading? Some quiet time will be good as it will allow me to get to some inside business, 

like reading, researching, sorting/storing saved seeds, and knitting warm, wooly things. 

Plus, we are developing fresh eating strategies for the chickens.

Books on the Go - 

Currently reading and loving the streamlined methods proposed in 

'The Lean Farm' by Ben Hartman, all ideas we'd like to implement gradually ourselves, 

returning to review parts of 'The Small-Scale Poultry Flock' by Harvey Ussery, 

(the best chicken book ever) and learning some interesting and useful information 

with 'Butchering' by Adam Danforth.

And then there are Christmassy projects to get started upon...