The reality was somewhat different...

The price structure remained constant because the reduced demand was met by the tour operators reducing the supply; the last-minute prices only work if you are a couple or are prepared to share a room with a stranger for a week; and no Swedish tour operator flies to Greece after the end of October anyway.

After playing for quite a while with catalogues and web-sites, the idea of paying a normal price for a week in a white concrete hotel beside a bright-blue swimming pool on Cyprus, Madeira or a Canary island began to pale somewhat. But what I did get was a remarkably-priced return ticket with Lufthansa between Stockholm and Athens, and the information, from friends who are experts on this kind of thing, that you could book accommodation when you arrived, and you could expect to hire a car at an off-season rate.

In the interests of staying in touch with life-support systems out of season, the choice seemed to be between Crete and Rhodes: from a little book about the Greek islands I learnt that Rhodes gets 20% of all Greek's tourism; and from the "Greek Islands" web-site, I discovered that the boat from Athens to Rhodes takes twice as long as the boat from Athens to Crete, and that the return boat from Crete to Athens would arrive just in time for me to get straight to the airport without having to spend the night in the city...

But these days the idea of a cheap life-style in Greece is something of a myth for those of us who start out with a Swedish income - we seem to be right up there with Portugal, Spain and Southern Italy as Europe's "areas with special needs" ...

Then there's another aspect which was fundamental for me, but has nothing to do with Crete really. Actually it's not too much to say that the basic concept of the venture foundered: on the third day a wire which connects Jenny's transformer to the hole in the wall came loose, and it wasn't possible to get it mended or replaced, so it wasn't possible to use her at all once the battery power was used up. Even after sleeping and eating and doing Qi Gong and talking to people and driving, there are still rather a lot of waking hours in the day: and the only way I could think of making any constructive use them was reading. I had nothing with me, but I was able to get a couple of monster-length novels in English, which just about saved the situation: but it felt like an almost pointless emergency solution, a second-best hardly worth the name.

As I said, my idea was to drive around a bit visiting a variety of delightful fishing villages, and choose one to stay in for most of the time as a rest. In fact, there was never a moment when, while driving, I had the feeling "Ah, this would be a nice place to stop!". I stopped each day simply because it was getting dark and I needed to sleep somewhere ... By the last whole day I'd understood that what I was looking for didn't exist, and made a conscious choice to stay where I was anyway ...