“Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die,
Life’s a broken-winged bird,
that cannot fly.”
--Langston Hughes
In this post, we continue to sidestep a bit from “travel” but then what travelers haven’t once or twice imagined themselves chasing a daydream of owning a home in some foreign location. . .
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| "That stone house on the hill. . ." |
We’d arrived back in The Mani in late June to close in on that daydream of ours: owning a home in Greece. The purpose of our month-long trip was to purchase ‘that stone house on the hill’—the one on the far right in the photo above to be exact. We’d examined it twice last spring along with several others. It was ‘the one’.
Our offer had been accepted, a down payment made and a closing date set before we left the U.S.
By noon our first day in Greece we’d opened a bank account and secured tax ID numbers (both necessary for home ownership in this country).
A few days later we toured the house with its current owners (we’d met them last spring) and had a tutorial on details like power and water sources, and olive grove maintenance.
They were busy packing their belongings to ship back to their homeland, England. Their big boxes would leave several days before closing. They would leave Greece July 17th.
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| The house's front deck and view from it |
As they prepared to leave; we prepared to arrive
and function – if even on our planned part-time basis – in this new world. We were learning to think of temperatures as Celsius, not Fahrenheit; measurements using the Metric System (cheating by using a dual tape measure we’d purchased that had both millimeters and inches) and we spoke of prices in terms of euros – not dollars. We were immersing ourselves in another culture – just what we had hoped to do with the purchase of a house here.
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| View from the bedroom deck |
We all moved toward the closing date – the day we would take occupancy of this vacation home of ours: July 10th.
As we would have only 12 days in our new property on this trip we established a timeline of projects that would be undertaken or possibly completed before we returned to the U.S.
The 17-tree olive grove, pictured below, in need of some major trimming, was
The Scout’s focus while I had my eye on painting interior walls and getting some new furniture in place.
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| I had brought the paint chips with us |
We’d decided this home set amidst olive groves would do well with a bit of country rustic and had decided upon these pieces as ‘probable’ for the house that had both dark stone accent walls intermixed with plaster walls in its main living area:
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| The furniture we'd chosen |
We were ready! Our funds were in the bank and all our paperwork completed except for ‘that document’ that I mentioned last week. So we set off to explore the Peloponnese peninsula’s most western tip during the few days we had before closing.
~ Waking from the Midsummer’s Daydream ~
Upon our return from the road trip we learned the closing date was going to be
delayed a few days. The owner’s civil engineer hadn’t yet filed necessary paperwork for the property’s registration – it would ‘surely be done’ by the following week. Then ‘
that document’ we’d been waiting for could be prepared and closing could still take place before the owners left for England. (Perhaps on my July 16th birthday? Now, that would be memorable!)
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| Scene on island of Kefalonia |
So with more days to fill while we waited we set off on a second road trip, this one took us to the Ionian Island of Kefalonia – an amazingly beautiful land mass in the Ionian Sea. I’ll feature it in an upcoming post.
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| Town square in Argostoli, Kefalonia |
On our second evening on the island, as we were settling in on the town square to sip some wine, we received what shall forever be known as
the daydream ‘wake-up’ call (that’s
The Scout on the phone in the upper right hand corner) from our realtor:
New problems had just surfaced. . . other paperwork – several years worth of income tax reports, necessary for the sale of the house, hadn’t been filed by the owners.
(Note: If you own property in Greece you must file annual income tax returns whether you generate income there or not – in fact, you must file documentation each year to show from where your funds do come. You must file other income tax forms reporting the ownership of property.)
The owners -- who’d lived there for years apparently hadn’t known that—they’d never filed a report. It would delay the closing a minimum of another 10 days to 2 weeks. The owners would search for those documents after they returned to England as that’s where they believed the documents were.
And they also needed to find proof of their purchase of the house. . .it, too, was believed to be in England.
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| Bougainvillea blooms and blue skies on Kefalonia |
Our flight back to the U.S. was July 22nd.
If found, none of their new documentation would even be submitted for review until the first of August.
If approved. . .
So, it was that lovely warm evening on Kefalonia that our daydream got away from us. As we calculated the growing list of “if’s” that loomed ahead and the mounting costs of this already pricey trip, we called the deal off.
We had been so concerned about bringing all the appropriate paperwork we needed for the sale, it hadn’t occurred to us to ask if the sellers had all the paperwork in place that they needed – after all, the house had been on the market for more than two years. . .
Instead of closing in on that daydream, we spent a portion of my birthday at our Greek bank completing paperwork to return our money for the house purchase back to the U.S. (It arrived a few hours before we did the following week.)
The owners left for England on their scheduled July 17th.
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| The freeway between Athens and The Mani |
We left The Mani, drove to Athens and flew home on our scheduled date.
Instead of the decade or so we’d envisioned, our daydream ended up lasting only a month. But had we not acted on it, we’d have always wondered if we would have had the courage to do it.
This trip proved we could . . .
We came so very close.
And so ends the daydream tales from Greece – for now. We will get back to reality travel tales with our next post. Thanks for joining us today ~ it always is fun to have friends along on the journey; especially when they don’t go as expected!
Linking up:
Budget Travelers Sandbox – Travel Photo Thursday
Sunday’s Weekend Travel Inspirations and Sunday Traveler
Mosaic Monday
Correct! It is an olive to be sure. 
It is just a bit more than a three hour drive from the Athens Airport on a modern-freeway with toll booths and rest stops (with gasoline stations and restaurants) at regular intervals along the way. The freeway circumvents Athens so it is an easy-drive even for those on a first-time road trip.
On the Greek “cute-o-meter” the buildings in Kalamata can’t compete with the likes of postcard perfect Santorini and Mykonos. 
