Chapter One: In Which We Depart and We Arrive

“Well, maybe the fifth time’s the charm” 

It was Sunday June 7, 2020 and we were sitting in the backseat of my parents’ car driving to SFO, cracking anxious jokes to break the tension. After our flights had been canceled on April 4, May 12, May 25, and then June 2, we tried to not to get our hopes up that perhaps- finally- tonight we would be allowed to fly.

This moment was one we had been waiting for four years. Since at least 2016, we had been planning, saving and preparing to leave behind our Silicon Valley jobs and SF apartment in favor of a sailboat in the Mediterranean. But as our departure date of April 4 drew near, the refrain of “sing Happy Birthday three times while you wash your hands” shifted in the span of one week to “stay home and socially distance.” Borders started slamming shut. Death tolls in Italy and Spain were apocalyptic and then suddenly it was all out of control. 

We postponed our departure, naively thinking we’d only have to wait until the end of April. Then the end of May. When June arrived, we glimpsed a window of opportunity. Greece had locked down very early, containing the virus almost entirely to several thousand cases and fewer than 200 deaths in the entire country. Then Greece announced that it would be reopening to tourism in June and testing all incoming entrants. We decided this window may not come again: we could travel relatively safely now between SF and Greece- two locations with very low incidence of the virus- and we would be tested on arrival, alleviating our concern that we would possibly bring the virus with us. We had to try. 

And so there we were, on our way to the airport. My wonderful, brilliantly supportive parents had spent the last days helping us endlessly pack and re-pack our bags- rearranging the items into the optimal space/weight/carry-on/checked solution. My mother spent two days at the sewing machine making us custom face masks and converting several of Ángel’s work slacks to shorts- the perfect heralding of our changing priorities and lifestyle. My father set up a “Create Your Dream Trail Mix” bar from which Ángel and I greedily scooped nuts, dried fruit and chocolates to create our ideal mixes for the 40+ hour journey to Crete. 

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Never once did they chide us for why exactly we felt the need to uproot our comfortable lives and move onto a boat in the midst of a global pandemic. Looking at them in the front seat, I wondered aloud exactly how old I would be when my parents no longer drive me to the airport. “Never,” my father replied “we will always drive you.”

We arrived to a scene exactly as dystopian as you would imagine: an almost entirely empty SFO, staffed by a skeleton crew of masked flight agents and small knots of tense passengers dressed for the end of the world. We unloaded our preposterous amounts of luggage (over 300 pounds to be more precise), hugged my parents, and left them outside the airport- an act that above anything else made me realize how insane the current situation was. On every other trip I’d ever taken, my parents walked me all the way up to the gate and then stood there, watching me inch through the security line. But in 2020, we walked alone into the airport, equipped with N-95 masks, Clorox wipes, and sheaves of photocopied documentation proving our residence (i.e. our boat) in Greece.

At each airport, we feared we’d be sent back. I imagined a harsh German customs agent in Frankfurt laughing at my claim that our “residence” was a boat in Greece that I’d never even seen in person. But at each stage, our folio of documents assuaged the customs officials, and we were let through until miraculously, we were in Athens. 

Our first two flights had been quite safe- empty middle seats, probably only 40% plane capacity and everyone in masks, but the flight from Frankfurt to Athens was close to 100% capacity with Greeks returning home. We had read that in Athens we would be tested and then sent overnight to a hotel to await our results. We waited from the back of the plane as groups of 30 disembarked and were tested. Finally it was our turn. However, when we finished the throat swab and started lining up by the door to get on the bus to the hotel, we were told that we could go. We looked blankly at the official. 

“Go? Just go?”

“Yes. We have your information and will notify you with the results of your test. If you’re negative, you self-isolate for seven days. If you’re positive, you will have two weeks of enforced quarantine”

We looked at each other: it had worked. We were here. We were in Greece. No one was going to send us home. 

Ángel scoured his phone for options. There was a flight to Crete leaving in an hour and a half. We collected our bags, dashed upstairs from arrivals to departures, bought two tickets, and suddenly realized that it was all going to work. Our crazy plan was going to work. 

Tears welled in my eyes as we touched down in Crete on a landing strip that, as with many things in Greece, runs parallel along the sea. In the waning light, I saw both the sea and my own reflection in the window, exhausted, teary eyes peering above my mask, gazing for the first time on the rugged, scrubby beauty of Crete.

From the airport in the capital city of Heraklion, it was an hour drive east to Agios Nikolaos where our boat is berthed. We arrived at the marina in total darkness, dragging our bloated suitcases, and unsure even where our boat was since when Ángel visited her in January she had still been in dry dock. When we finally found her, I stared at Gradisca’s wide transom, floating a full 6 feet from the dock and tried to imagine how we would jump aboard– much less heave 70 pound bags over that expanse. In the Mediterranean, it’s very common for boats to be tied up perpendicularly against the dock and people use what look like dainty little drawbridges, elegantly called “pasarelles,” to cross from dock to boat. 

We debated the merits of boarding the boat next to ours  and then hopping onto our boat. We decided against this and in a remarkable stroke of luck found a spare plank lying halfway down the dock that worked as a makeshift passarelle. 

Ángel then I boarded our new boat where we were immediately confronted with several realizations: we had no no running water, limited electricity (whatever had been generated from the solar panels), no toilet, and no real idea of where anything was either on the boat or in our morass of bags. 

But one thing at a time. We set to work erecting our pasarelle to at least get the bags aboard. This was quite a feat as we had no light since both our phones were dead (typical) and the batteries in the lantern we packed were dead (I heard my mother’s voice saying “remember to have fresh batteries in your lantern” and thought- “well that was prescient”). 

Mid-project, we were flooded with a beautiful stream of light, illuminating our whole deck. It was our neighboring boat (the one we had luckily decided not to board in the middle of the night) and the older Swiss couple on board seemed a bit taken aback to have two recent arrivals from the States showing up in the middle of the night. After a few questions, they retreated back into their boat and we were back in darkness, trying pointlessly to use the light of my tablet as a flashlight. 

When we finally got everything aboard, we grabbed our toiletries- ready to brush our teeth, shower, and put the chaos behind us. But we arrived to a print-out on the building door:

We stared at the sign. It was one o’clock in the morning. Who would know? We were quite tempted, but in the end, our better angels won out and we turned away. Out of options, I went to the back of the boatyard, took off my pants and peed in the shrubbery. One would think this was the low point of the night, but I think lower still was the realization that my phone had fallen out of my pants pocket. For one horrible second, I thought I had peed on my brand new phone. But God wasn’t that cruel. On my pant leg yes (charming) but on my phone, thank goodness no. 

Back on the boat, we improvised a “shower” that consisted of going over the smellier parts of our bodies with a Purell wipe and then slathering ourselves with scented lotion to cover the shame and soothe our alcohol-taut skin. Finally on Wednesday at 2 a.m. Cretan time, we collapsed into bed, ending a journey that had commenced Sunday evening in California. We lay awake, listening to the clankings and gurglings of the boat lines and the Mediterranean sea swirling around our new little home, until finally by 3 a.m. we drifted off to sleep.