I had a delightful visit with Charlotte. She has lived a very interesting live in many different countries and speaks a number of languages. It tuned out that the reason she was in the camera store was to have her art printed up for her Christmas cards. She gave me one that I cherish. She wrote in Greek part of the poem :

Σα βγεις στον πηγαιμό για την Ιθάκη,να εύχεσαι νάναι μακρύς ο δρόμος 

She did not use these exact words, but it means something like : May your road to Ithaka be long and may the journey be more meaningful than the destination.

She calls me “Odysseus of the Seas”. I like the idea of giving my Third Life a legendary destination. I have covered practically the entire voyage of Odysseus from the Black Sea to the furthest south and west in the Mediterranean.

Another gorgeous day. I was dressed warm this morning but had ice cold hands on the bicycle ride up the hill to the church of San Vicente. It is a very small group at mass, about 30. Father José (Pepe) Ribas does another service in San Carlos later in the morning and one in the evening at San Felipe. This time I have a picture with the head of St. Vincent’s statue showing. Most of the parishioners gather in the church hall for coffee. Yesterday Charlotte had told me that when her husband came to live in San Vicente, in the fifties, there was no road to Ibiza yet. You either had to come by boat or hike a steep narrow trail across the ridge. Later on there was a mule cart trail. The Padre told us, at coffee, the story that when the first cars started to use the new road they would often have to deal in the dark with mule carts without lanterns. At one time a villager called the local constable to confront one of the farmers who did not bother with a light on his caretta. The gendarme asked the farmer: “Why don’t you use  alight?”. The farmer did not answer him but proceeded to take the mule out of his harness and tied him behind the caretta and then he put him self in front of the cart and when the constable repeated his question he pointed across his shoulder and said: “Talk to the ass behind me”. This is a true story and I would not dare doubt the Padre’s version.

On the way back I picked some Prickly Pear Cactus pears and young shoots to make my favorite Mexican vegetable dish, Napolitos. And I gathered more Boletus/Eekhoorntjesbrood, as you can see from the below picture. If I would have shipwrecked here on the main island I could have survived without running into people like Angeles and Moss, etc.