For now the salvaging is over. We have everything we need as far as clothes, shoes, dog stuff, bedding, etc. All the rest will have to wait. It was a herculean effort, but what choice do we have since the closest stores are an hour and a half away on washed-out roads. Once, and hopefully soon, the water will return and then we can make some real progress. I am looking forward to washing the dishes and pots & pans that survived the flood. Surprisingly, almost all the Bulgarian/Polish pottery survived—hearty stuff!
Now the focus for the next week is getting Cookie to his new home in the UK. Today I will go to the vet and get him a passport—hoping that it is a quick process. As soon as I have a passport, I will buy the two of us plane tickets. My hope that Cookie will be on his way by the end of next week. We will miss his bubbly personality, but at the moment having three dogs is over the top. After the Cookie transport the next on the list will be finding a long-term living situation.
PS. I went back to the Metochi spring yesterday and the abandoned Moroccan blanket was still there. It made me feel guilty, so I scrubbed it some more in the spring, picking it up over and over, trying to rinse the mud until the water ran clean. Then beating it on the rock, scrubbing it some more. I’m sure the people coming to the spring for water thought I was a bit mad. Maybe so.