The 25th Meeting-versary, Part II: Costa Navarino
“The unexpected favors of fortune, no matter how dazzling, do not mean very much to us. They may excite or divert us for a time, but when we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which is formed in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.”
—Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark
We hastened from Hydra anticipating three carsick hours through the mountainous Peloponnese. About a third of the way our lunch stop in Nafplio, where we’d spent a few days in 1998 and 2018, was planned to touch base with sense memory and break up the drive. A famously elegant destination, it also promised elegant dining options. (The food had been so-so in Hydra.)
After a restorative lunch we hit the road in earnest. Somewhere amid the Taygetus mountains a storm began to brew and halved the sky ahead, the first drops we’d seen in rainstarved Greece. The sharp grey sheet seemed a threshold to our new world, from island to coast through dizzying peaks and arid olive green. We came out of the dramatic squall close to our destination in Costa Navarino, where the famous French-Greek tennis coach Patrick Mouratoglou had decided to replicate Nice in Greece, re-creating his longstanding tennis epicenter in France with twelve clay courts (and one grass) overlooking the Ionian sea.
The real season had ended, so there were no camps for the kids. I now know that going to Greece circa August 24 means summer is over, full stop. Every adult mortal returns to work the last Monday of August before every child goes back to school the following week. We had spent summer’s last gasp in Hydra and were now firmly in the afterglow. Instead of formal instruction I booked two courts for two hours each morning for five days, our own little family camp. Bret and I spent those hours trying to whip ourselves back into shape with some very hot, slippery tennis on the most beautiful courts we’ve known. Our far-fitter children—who’d been playing ferociously all summer—thought little of our comeback, although Cordelia relished beating Daddy. I guess this part was really about us. We made progress and, with the tennis love running high, it was a pain point to be missing the US Open energy in New York and even on TV. (With my life on the line, I would not have been able to make Greek television work.) I guess traveling in this otherwise ideal window between camp and school will cost us Billie Jean King.
Going from quintessential Greek island life to the coast, we traded tranquil waters, snorkeling, and public beaches for ceaseless wind and a wild tide, ideal for wave-jumping and “brown noise” that lulled us to sleep, just as in Banyuls, with my favorite sound in the world. This Airbnb was a vertiginous “maisonette” on a property including two other homes with pools, one large house, and another like ours. There were no other occupants so what became our private beach and pools made swimsuits elective, a freeing experience I can’t share here. A ping-pong table at the main house put the children’s sense of providential good luck over the top.
On the map our Airbnb had appeared adjacent to the tennis center, but although our home nearlylooked onto the courts, we were in fact a 10-15 minute drive through knotty olive groves and Mouratoglou’s ongoing construction, which includes multi-million dollar villas in-progress, to enter the compound. This location also meant we were not walking distance from anything, so decidedly outside my peripatetic happy place, where I can run errands to practice language and take a family breather. The silver lining of this isolation was nonstop playtime for the kids who tend to get on impossibly well and seemed closer than ever. I never knew the five years between son and daughter would make for such a unique best friendship with an hilarious hierarchy—the little one both in the seat of worship and power.
After tennis it was eat and repeat. In Messinia the food was much improved, the tomatoes redder, cucumbers crisper, feta more flavorful, and the saganaki with the perfect sear as I remembered it from those first a-ha moments of 1998. A couple of days this meant some combination of lunch and beach in nearby Gialova—now the it destination in this up-and-coming area with progressive dining and posh shops. Two other days brought us to Pylos, a bit further south, with its ruins and restaurants on waters you can dive into between bites. Lunch would lead to a work and pool session at home before dinner at home or the nearest taverna, Dimitris, where time had all but stopped. In spite of its proximity next to a booming KOA beach club à la Mykonos, the husband-and-wife team served traditionally excellent Greek fare without pomp. As I watched them cook then run dishes to tables, I realized what a working marriage and family restaurant could really look like.
Back home, our version of this loomed large, limiting our bandwidth and time for tourism. Messinia is rich with sites we missed as we elected instead to embrace wells of serenity between spurts of work. We made one farther-flung afternoon trip to William’s Olympia as promised, where the ruins conjured athletes past (no ancient tennis courts to be found).
One night we attempted a date night at Anama, a spot about which our Hydra friends had raved. I say attempted because it hadn’t occurred to me that we could have an issue with the kids at this age, certainly not compared with separation anxiety in Santorini five years ago. About an hour into dinner I checked on the kids only to reach an inconsolable Cordelia who’d been speed-dialing us (in a rare move to be present I dared keep my phone in my purse), along with family members in the States, who had begun texting me. The winds off the Ionian were high and had spooked her with wildly thumping shutters. (Thank you, Zeus.) We bolted down our fig tarte tatin, ordered to be compared with Gotham’s famous apple version (about to resurface the first day of fall). The dinner was excellent while it lasted, with impossibly sweet service surpassing even the food.
Ready for the next adventure, we rued the end of this chapter—the heart of our trip—as we passed the halfway point of our precious stolen time. On our last full day we visited the Instagram darling beach of Voidokilia. The salty, shallow, horseshoe-shaped lagoon—so safe Cordelia could swim straight through the middle—made for a magical last adventure in this region. All phones had died so we have no evidence of the moment, only our now-new memories.
We will hope for the honor of going back when Mouratoglou has finished his work and with our newfound love of Messinia. See you in Sparta!
