The Blue Mosque, Istanbul, Turkey |
Sailing Faith: The Long Way Home |
Corfu, Greece |
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The Gregg A Granger Family Adventure |
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Mediterranean | ||||||||||||||
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Tombs carved in the mountain near Dalyan Turkey |
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Our visit is a year and a half after the elections in Palestine. The United States supported these elections as part of our stated intention of spreading democracy. Palestinians elected Hamas against Israel’s and the United States’ wishes. To reward their newly acquired democratic principles, the United States helped Israel freeze the flow of goods, services, tourism, and especially money into Palestinian territory. It worked, and Bethlehem is sad. We visit the shepherd’s fields and the nativity, and purchase postcards from the one shop not boarded up on the day we visit. Greece We’re moored against the quay. Five meters from our transom is Kalymnos’ main waterfront road, and across that is a small information kiosk on the sidewalk with bars, internet cafés, and restaurants surrounding it. Young Greek men like loud motorcycles, trucks service the restaurants and bars, and a small ferry next to us is cleaning their hull, using a noisy compressor to pump air to the diver. Something in the road is covered by a steel plate that goes chrah-lunk-lunk every time a car drives over it. The buildings are all three floors by European standards, four by American; being situated facing the harbor, they reflect the noise and fumes of the traffic, and the aromas from the restaurants, our way. Our berth could evolve into a complaint in an area where people are rude, but here everyone is genuine, hard-working, and honest enough, and the noise is the salt that brings out the flavor of the place. (page 219) A Storm in Spanish Waters I never learned to like rain much, and I like high winds even less, but lightning scares me. We do the only thing we can think of as this system engulfs us. We pray, “Dear God, save us, save our boat, and don’t let us get hit by lightning.” He handles it on all three accounts. What arrives is an interesting storm that wraps its arms around us, leaving a patch of blue sky that diminishes as the rain and lightning close in from all sides. We reduce sails on its approach and try, under motor, to stay inside this blue patch of sky, away from the lightning. I’m hand-steering from the helm in gusts up to fifty knots, with Faith taking a beating from the confused seas, when I feel something in the steering snap; the wheel spins freely (we didn’t think about praying for the steering system). The ability to steer is something we’ve grown to appreciate, and I miss it instantly. (pages 228-229)
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Rome
Gibraltar
Kalymnos, Greece, the sponge diving center of the Mediterranean |
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Israel's Seperation Wall, here, between Jerusalem and Bethlehem |
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