Errands in Lefkas Town

Tues 7 Sept 2010

Tuesday morning - the woodyard. I love the place. There's a really helpful girl who speaks good English (she told me her name and said it's short for 'Chrysanthemum' in Greek - for some reason this hasn't helped me remember it at all).

So you buy the wood, and they cut it to length (give or take a few centimetres - which probably aren't very important). They also let me scrump among the offcuts, which is great for getting extra bits which are bound to come in useful one day!

While in Lefkas we also checked out whether we could get a phone line put into a static caravan / camper van. They said no. What about in a shed? (a 'spitaki' or 'little house') - yep, that'd be fine, they said. Weird. We'll have to get the shed built and then organise the line, but it looks like we'll be able to get the internet when we move in.

We also started the quest for straw bales. We have no illusions about this one - it's going to be tough. Our first call was to the garage just before the crossroads on the way into Lefkas. Dave was sceptical (straw bales in a garage?) but I'd taken the precaution of writing out the Greek for straw (Achiro) and drawing a vague picture of a bale. The garage man was very helpful: Straw for sleeping on or straw for eating? We assumed he meant animals. We need bedding straw. Eating straw is hay - if you use it in building it tends to grow. No bedding straw, sorry - try Ag. Nikolaos on the way to Vonitsa. Ag. Nikolaos, okay, um ... where should we ask? A shrug for our sheer stupidity - at the shop, of course.

Finally we called in on Dieter, an Austrian friend who has taken over an electronics shop in Lefkas and is a whiz on photovoltaics. He gave us loads of useful info on solar panel sizes and optimum roof angles; batteries, regulators and inverters. Dave listened and asked intelligent questions, while I struggled with the strange minty green tea with milk that Dieter's assistant had provided. I should've asked for coffee.

After all this we went back to the woodyard to load up all the shorter pieces in the van and drive slowly and carefully home. Unloaded on the land to try them out, and realised we'd need more joists if they weren't to be too bouncy. We can get those tomorrow when we go back for the long pieces with Shrimpy in the big van.