Hello! Hope you’re good. Thanks for your replies to the last email. Very nice to hear from you. Ditching mailchimp and sending these as a regular email so hopefully it won’t be in spam this week.
Sitting in the staff house kitchen writing this before work. It’s been quite cold here for the past day or two, and I’m actually wearing a down jacket at the mo. It’d better warm up soon because our water is solar heated and I hate cold showers.
Past week has been super fun. Here’s my attempt to summarise. Just focusing on the people in this email, will talk more about the town, island and hotel another time.
I arrived in Vasiliki on Tuesday evening and met Cookie, the guy I’d heard so much about from the bike guides on the Isle of Wight. He’s one of those people who you can tell is good at board sports just by his stance. Ski goggle tan line, baggy board shorts and a battered old pick up truck. He’s in charge, and seems to have it all worked out – everything is systematised and runs like clockwork.
He showed me to my room. There were two beds and pretty soon my roomie showed up. He’s a lovely chap called Chris. Like everyone here apart from me, he’s done at least 1 season before and is mad keen on windsurfing. After this he’s planning to join the military, and his half of the room is always immaculate.
We went to dinner and met everyone else. For the first week, there were 7 of us here for setup, most of which are ‘beachies’ – they run the beach, and teach sailing and windsurfing. They’re all super nice, and happily, more than half are vegan so we’ve cooked as a group most nights.
But I’ve spent pretty much all of my days with a guy called Josh, who’s here to help me set up the bikes. He’s receiving this email too so bit strange describing him as if he won’t read this, but he’s the kind of guy who loves DnB, talks kinda road and wears t shirts with cool graphics. We get along super well so its been fun spending the week with him. Feels like we see eye to eye on quite a lot and he’s got a good sense of humour. Will be sad to see him go this week after everything’s set up.
The whole week was spent getting things ready. For Josh and me that meant taking the best parts off 50 or so crappy old bikes from another resort and producing 30 good bikes from them. It also meant learning the routes, so most days Josh and I have gone for a ride. The roads and trails are brilliant here.
The beach team is setting up loads of brand new windsurfing kit. The whole place has been strewn with thousands of pounds worth of gear in various stages of assembly – someone mentioned that the order Neilson put in with their kit supplier came to over a million pounds.
I found a 5 litre box of wine in the shop called ‘The Party’s Wine’, which we’ve all been pretty obsessed with. It’s just over 5 euro per box, which is perfect because we’re all paid peanuts. Sad news is that yesterday we bought the shop’s last box, so lets hope they restock soon.
Sunday was our first day off, and for the only time this season, everyone had it off together. Cookie and Maria (his girlfriend who is the fitness instructor) went their own way, and the rest of us rented a car and saw some of the island. Such a good day. We crammed a lot in. Brunch in a yacht harbour town, surrounded by English people wearing Musto. Then to a waterfall, then to a beautiful beach with a cave to swim to, then to another beach to jump off a big rock into the bluest water I’ve ever seen. Fair to say I didn’t impress the others with my driving – it was a shit car and wrong side of the road so took some getting used to. That evening more staff arrived and we had a big night in. The party wine flowed and a good time was had by all.
This week is the last week of setup, and with more hands on deck it shouldn’t take long to finish. Hoping the wind picks up so I can get out on the windsurf kit soon. Forecast is good for this afternoon.
And that’s about it! Keen to hear what you’ve been up to this week.
James
