It is Monday and everyone is a bit tired after the weekend. Luciana is feeling just fine today, no signs of being sick at all. We are very happy about that. Nothing serious, just a simple infection. And she has the right medicine now.
I got up and posted and wrote for a while, then we were off as a family to go grocery shopping. We have pretty much run out of foodstuffs at home and our extended (non-staple) foods are pretty much depleted. So this was our big grocery run and possibly our last big one while in Greece (it is amazing how quickly we get to the point that we have to start pulling back on food in the house!)
We started with a stop to the pharmacy where we needed to get more of the antibiotic for Luciana. We had only gotten one bottle of it when I was there on Saturday but we need three. So we made a quick and easy stop there.
We stopped at our favourite bakery heading down the hill and picked up some bread and profiterole.
Then we went down to the Lidl at the big intersection north of our village sitting just north of the highway. We did our big shopping there as they have great prices and many of the products that we want, like Dominica’s favourite muesli. We did a bunch of shopping there.
On the way back to the village we stopped at the fourth grocery that we use and grabbed the peanut butter that the girls like (or at least the one that they put up with) as that is the only place that regularly stocks it. Then it was back home for us.
A rather long outing of grocery shopping, but successful and we will not likely be doing anything like that for the rest of the time that we are in Greece. It will be all small things from here on out, we need to make sure that the fridge and pantry are cleaned out before it is time for us to move on to Romania in six or seven weeks.
Luciana is “all better” today. No signs of fever at all since before the hospital on Friday night. She is perky and happy and just wanted to spend today playing.
Liesl played Castaway Paradise for a bit this morning. She continues to love the game. She can lose hours with that game.
Dominica and I did a little looking for games online today. We spent some time talking about how we could use video game design as part of the girls’ homeschool curriculum and I was taking her through video game studio products available via Steam like RPGMaker. She was very excited about what tools were available so we looked through lots of products and then tons of games that were commercially made with RPGMaker.
Once we had the video game room to ourselves, Dominica and I took some time this afternoon to play Highrise Heroes together. We played a lot and are down into the last sixteen levels or so! We are really enjoying that game but we have run into a few levels that are insanely difficult. We had a few that took a few tries and we are currently stuck on one that we cannot get through at all. The jump in difficulty in being able to even progress to the next level is dramatic and doesn’t fit well with the initial feeling of the game.
Luciana insisted in playing a game for a little while. So we played some Goat Simulator. It is amazing how good she has gotten at that game. She is very adept at playing it and has figured out some cool tricks that I never thought of. The roller coaster throws you out so you can’t ride it, for example, but she figured out that if you lick it you get to ride it while being thrown out and flying in the air by your tongue. It is hilarious.
Once she was done playing Dominica played Millenium which is an RPGMaker game from a moderate sized game developer so that she could see the kinds of things that can be made with the tool sets. We snuggled on one of the beds in the game room, the only seating that we have, and played that for probably two hours until we were getting pretty sleepy. Then we played Secrets of a Lost Planet for a while which started off like it might be okay but quickly devolved into total nonsense and appears that about five minutes into development the writer(s) must have walked out and left everyone unsure what to do so they just took stock hidden object images that they had available and stuck them wherever they fit in a sci-fi adventure game. It’s nuts.
By the end of the day we had spent nearly the entire day in the game room. It was a nice change. Relaxing and a chance to actually do something fun.
We were all very tired here this morning in the Miller household. But thank goodness we woke up and Luciana was feeling well. No fever today at all and she was her regular, happy self.
My first order of business was driving to the pharmacy in the next town to get her antibiotics and more of Dominica’s acid reflux medication. Like our other European medical experiences, this was easy and cheap. No wait whatsoever, had the medicine the moment that I walked in the door and the antibiotics was just four Euros and Dominica’s acid reflux stuff was thirteen Euros for more than double the volume that she gets for seventeen dollars at the CVS in Texas. So a bit better than half the price!
It was a lovely day, but only I went out for the drive. I got back and Luciana took her medicine right away. Then I went to the grocery store and got us supplies for dinner. Mostly potatoes so that Dominica can make her corn and potato soup again.
Liesl played Castaway Paradise for a while this afternoon. She made huge progress and opened up new areas of the game. She was super excited about that. Luciana just hung out in her little spot under my work loft and watched videos until she fell asleep. She is feeling much better but is still pretty run down and needs a lot of sleep. But she is very clearly on the road to recovery.
I did a bit of writing and stuff this afternoon. Got three new “sections” of my Linux Administration book done today. Working hard today to catch up on stuff as yesterday was basically a lost day completely.
The girls were both on the tired side. Luciana slept much of the afternoon. Dominica was pretty run down, too. She made dinner, made sure that Luciana got her second dose of medicine and then went to bed to try to get some sleep by ten!
The girls watching Glitter Force together on Netflix this evening. That is Liesl’s new favourite show.
Around eleven this evening our beautiful, mild day turning into a crazy storm. Some rain and wind that was blowing stacks of metal chairs around outside. We dropped from about seventy two degrees during the day to fifty five at night in about one hour. Storms can roll in very quickly when you live on the sea.
What is really amazing is that it was a ninety degree difference between us here in Greece and back home in New York less than a week ago. Watertown, New York, we heard, was the world’s coldest city one day, even! Everyone back home was buried under snow and bitter cold. Now it is five degrees warmer there than here, right now!
The storm lasted into the night. All of our metal chairs outside were blown all around and the noise was incredible. Living out on an island does make for a lot of wind potential.
We all slept in quite a bit today, Dominica was the first one up. The rest of us slept into the afternoon. Luciana, thankfully, had her fever down to 101 during the night and down to 100 by the time that she got up, and she was feeling well. She actually got up and went and played with Liesl upstairs for quite a while before coming downstairs, which they almost never do. They are much happier children today.
It is another just wonderful day on Crete. We opened all the windows and doors and it is bright and sunny but not much wind today so things are not all getting blown around. This is just about perfect.
By the time that Luciana had been awake for about three hours, her temperature was down to 99! Her fever has officially broken now. And she is much perkier and asking for food, real food again.
We were counting our chickens too soon, today. By late afternoon Luciana suddenly spiked to a fever of 103.7! Too fast and too hot for comfort. We gave her ten minutes or so and she had come down to 103, but we could not wait at this point so we got the kids ready and set out to find a doctor for her.
The twenty four hour clinic that we found was very far east of the city, so we had quite a long drive ahead of us. Long in relational terms, it is slow driving through the city but the total journey could not have been fifteen miles. But we did not know the area at all, we have never driving to the east side of the city before, let alone beyond it.
We actually did pretty well getting right to and finding the clinic. Sadly, the advertised 24×7 clinic was closed. Maybe out of business, who knows. Thank goodness there was another clinic that we knew about right down the block so we went there and it was straight in to see the doctor in an instant. This was a private clinic, not a public one.
The doctor spent some time with Luciana and decided that she needed tests from lab at the hospital. It was twenty Euros for the visit, which is not bad. While we were there Ciana’s temperature was still over 103. The doctor asked us if Luciana was always this pale. We were pretty surprised as she’s not pale at all by our standards! Apparently in Greece we are all so pale that it throws people off.
We drove back to the city. Luciana said that she was hungry and really wanted to eat, which is a good sign, but this was a bad time to try to eat anything and we did not have any idea how to find convenient food. She told us that she does not want to go back home and eat but wants to eat in a restaurant tonight. Apparently we have not been eating out enough.
We did pretty well at locating the hospital which is buried in a part of the city where you cannot see it at all, even sitting on the street in front of it you would never know that it is there. We went in and it was straight into the ER (it was late, where else can you go and it was the only entrance) and they got us into see the doctor in like, well, instantly. We actually spent the most time between the car and the doctor telling them how to spell my first name than anything else. I’ve never been in a hospital that got you cared for so quickly.
The doctor was very nice and examined Luciana again. By this time, not even close to an hour later, her temperature was all the way down to normal! Crazy. She visibly felt fine and was acting pretty normal, too. The examination went well enough, thankfully just about everyone speaks English on Crete, and the doctor said that she had no concerns, that this was just a fever and likely a virus and that the fever is just the body correctly fighting it off and that we should wait it out a few more days before being concerned. Technically just had only had the fever for two full days at this point, it takes four for concern. The doctor’s one concern was a UTI so wanted to do a urinalysis to be sure that that wasn’t the issue as that is not viral and would need antibiotics. But ear infection and throat are definitely ruled out.
So we did the urine test, dropped that off with the lab, were told that we would have to wait two hours until eleven thirty (it was somewhat obviously nine thirty at this point) to get the results. We could get dinner while we waited, which everyone needed as none of us had eaten all day at this point.
We stopped and paid the bill before leaving. We were rather shocked to find that our trip to the hospital, without insurance to help cover us, not just going to the hospital but hitting the ER, paediatrics and using the lab cost us two cents under seven Euro. That’s right, we gave them a whopping seven Euro and got change back! Quick truly just one percent what this would have cost in the States. Not seven hundred Euro, which we were prepared for, but seven! It is truly a different world. And better care than we get from clinics or hospitals back home. Once again we are so happy with Greece (and Europe.)
We dropped some things off at the car and discovered that the lights had been half left on again. This time at least we had an excuse with the emergency, them being half turned off, no way to see the light from them under the city street lights, etc. Thank goodness the car turned over. So we took a few minutes to sit in the car and relax while the battery topped up. I left the girls there and walked down the street to see what our handy dinner options would be. That way we were not wasting car charging time while seeking food. I found a very nearby cafe and a pizza place and figured one of those two would do just fine. I came back and got the family and we walked down the street.
Everyone opted for the pizza place. It had a few people in it but was essentially empty. At first they brought us menus that were one hundred percent in Greek. Um, not going to work. We could not tell what a single thing was. They found some with partial English in them after a bit, though.
Luciana just wanted French fries, which was fine. Anything to get her eating. She has been mostly living on juice (mostly orange and carrot) for days. She just needs calories to fuel the fever. The rest of us got our own fries with cheese on them and a vegetable pizza, even Liesl wanted the veggie pizza.
Liesl Excited to Have Greek Pizza
The fries came out and we got Luciana eating. Then the pizza came. Liesl was ready to burst with excitement when it arrived.
The pizza ended up being truly epic. Positively delicious. One of the best I have ever had. Liesl thinks it is her all time favourite. It was so good.
After dinner we had an hour to kill, yet. The girls just wanted to sit in the car and watch videos on their Kindle Fires. Dominica was happy to sit with them. I used the time to have a nice, long walk around that part of Rethymno and get to know town a little. It was a nice, quiet Friday night and the weather was just cool enough to make it nice for a walk. It was a great chance to just relax for a bit.
At about eleven thirty we went in to the lab and picked up the results. Then we had a small adventure trying to find the paediatric department which turned out to be on the first floor and over a bridge. We found it and the same doctor that we had before in the ER (the ER has its own paediatric department) checked Luciana out again. She looked at the lab results and instantly it was clear that Luciana had a UTI, which explains nearly all of the symptoms. We really should have guessed it before tonight but we think she had a stomach bug just before getting the UTI that confused us. But that was Monday and she was fine until the fever hit on Wednesday evening. There was a gap but we did not really notice. And it means that the rest of us have probably just had a cold and that was masking things, too.
The doctor decided to do one more urine test, just to be safe. But we will find out about that later should it show that this first one was wrong. We got a prescription for an antibiotic and were on our way quite quickly. A quick stop at the lab to drop off the work to be done and we were on our way home. No additional charge for this extra visit or lab work.
There was no pharmacy open on the way home, it was around midnight at this point, so we will have to deal with that first thing in the morning. We got home and the kids relaxed for a bit. Luciana watched some Dora the Explorer and Liesl played Castaway Paradise. Dominica was the first to bed, by hours.
The girls stayed up and got me to play Goat Simulator a little and then had me get them some food. It wasn’t until around four that I finally got them off to bed. I wanted to get SGL all caught up before turning in myself to make sure that everyone knew what the status was on Luciana’s hospital visit before calling it a night.
Luciana’s fever did not return at all this evening. The high temperature taken at the first clinic was the last elevated temperature that we saw and she was awake for about eight hours after that reading was taken. She was in a pretty good mood all evening as well. Although she did tell me that she wanted to sleep alone again tonight because when she is sick she likes having lots of room.
We have been hoping for some unique Greek experiences. I am not sure that this is exactly what we had had in mind, but I suppose that there is always a silver lining. We really are getting the experience of what it is like to live in Greece and deal with normal, every day problems. This is one that will definitely be good reference material for others travelling like us.
Got up at ten today. Have a little bit of a headache, hoping that I am not coming down with the same thing that Dominica and Luciana have. I’ve had a cough for days, so likely I have it just not as badly as they do. Luciana woke up at ten as well, used the bathroom and went back to bed. Dominica got up at the same time that I did. Liesl slept in until afternoon.
It is a gorgeous, but windy day, here on Crete. It is seventy three degrees and the sun is out. I am very glad that I was up earlier than usual and got time to enjoy it.
When Liesl got up I managed to cajole her into walking to the corner market with me. She never leaves the house. She ended up being super happy the moment that we set foot outside of our door and she had a great time. She danced down the alleys and was just so happy to be out and about in the sun. She would stop at all of the open doorways to long abandoned houses and barns and look in.
We did our shopping, Liesl insisted on carrying the grocery basket while we did, then walked back home. When we got home, Liesl wanted to explore the streets right around the house, so we took in the groceries and then went straight out and explored. She then wanted to explore town! She is very excited about getting out today.
We went in the house, ate a quick breakfast and set out for a walk together, just Liesl and me. We went down to the north side of town and down the hill for quite some ways. We did a round trip of about seven kilometers, it was a good walk. And it was very downhill so the walk back provided rather a bit of exercise.
Liesl exploring a ruined home in Prines, Crete
The walk was gorgeous and we had a really good time together. Liesl carried a little container of gummy treats that she had picked out at the grocery store on the corner and ate one or two now and then as we walked. We walked out of the village and found the where newer houses have been built and interesting living areas and a surprising amount of traffic for being where we were.
Liesl was excited to be walking towards the sea and exploring. It was a great way to spend the morning together. And so nice to be out of the house. And it gave her a much better appreciation for where we live as she has been pretty isolated from the fact that we live right by the sea all of this time.
Looking west from lower Prines, Crete. The peninsula at Chania.
The walk back up the hill was pretty exhausting, especially considering I, like Dominica and Luciana, most likely have the flu and this hit my lungs pretty hard. Liesl had wanted to walk even farther but I knew that she was not picturing just how long and hard the walk back the distance that we had gone already was going to be when switching from downhill to uphill. I was right and she was tired almost immediately. It was a long trip back for her.
We got to see an assortment of wildlife, many sheep, goats, dogs and cats. I was amazed at the variety of housing once you left town. In my wanderings thus far I have not seen anything like these homes. Very nice, modern homes, but in a classic Greek style, built some alone and some in very small developments. They looked like wonderful places to live and many were actively in use, we could see people coming and going as we walked.
Once back it was time for me to write and Liesl to do school. Luciana was finally up and very sick today. Her fever is higher and she is not feeling well at all. Dominica is slightly better, but not well either. I was a little sick yesterday but today it hit me quite a bit more and I was rather under the weather for a good portion of the day but started to feel better in the evening.
This evening I made an emergency run to the next village for needed grocery supplies as we have run out of juice and stuff which Luciana has been living on. So I stocked us up on that and came right back home. It’s actually very quick and easy to do when the car is close by like it is right now, parked back at the church instead of way up the hill.
We had a pretty quiet night. Luciana and I played a little GoatZ at her request, but she did not last long before she wanted to lay back down. We are bit worried as her fever got up to 103 tonight, we know where the twenty four hour clinic is and are prepared to run there and we got a few names and addresses of paediatricians at the ready if we can manage to go there. She tends to feel pretty well when she has had Tylenol so we are keeping an eye on her and ready to go if we need to but are hoping that the fever will break by the morning.
Dominica and the girls went to bed pretty early tonight. I ended up being awake very late which I was not expecting but as the night went on I was feeling quite a bit better.
I went to sleep with Luciana again tonight but she told me that I couldn’t sleep there tonight. She is very odd with that, last night she asked me to stay with her, it was so sweet. Tonight she was very upset that I was there and made me leave immediately. So I went and squeezed in in the other room, which is a pain as I have to move my CPAP around whenever I move from one room to another. It isn’t as simple as it is for normal people.
