And, breathe.

Firstly, a little about my current surroundings: It is beautiful here. I’m in Nafplio (or is it Nafplia? Or Nafplion? Οr even Ναυπλιο?) for Claire & Paul’s wedding. They wanted a stunning setting and, boy, do they have one. I’m not great about booking holidays for myself, mostly because I want perfection and I’m a little scared about having to settle for mid-priced, second-best, but this place has confounded me. It is cheap - for €63 I have a large double en suite, lounge and kitchen in a quaint boutique house off a quiet backstreet in the centre of the town at Pension Acronafplia - and the town is jammed with gorgeous cafes, tavernas, boutiques and small, shady corners in which to chill out with a long, iced coffee. Despite my almost-forced reluctance to treat this trip as a ‘proper holiday’ I am finding myself relaxing into it very well indeed.

It hasn’t been without hiccups, though. I arrived in Athens on Wednesday evening and game enough as I would have been to hire a car here, I wasn’t about to attempt to navigate single-handedly 200km cross-country, in the dark, with no idea of even which direction to set off in. However, my overnight stop there proved somewhat of a false economy. The last-minute hotel, which was cheap and basic enough and which I booked solely on the rather dubious lastminute.com rating system, was located right across the city from the airport and I paid way more in a taxi than I would have liked to get there. I awoke on Thursday with no inclination to even try to see anything of interest, my sole priority being to get back to the airport to connect with a coach to get me here. At least I had the time to take the vastly cheaper Metro option.

This is the first time I have really travelled on my own; the amassed receipts prove that this is a pricier way to see the world and, having no-one else with which to bounce around itinerary ideas, I have certainly not experienced anywhere near the best of Athens. As I have already noted, I’ll just have to come back (not alone).

But now the wedding celebrations are in full swing. Claire & Paul’s friends are, naturally, a diverse and gregarious bunch and it’s nice to be able to meander around Nafplio’s streets and bump into relative strangers with whom I have already shared a meal or a coffee. These relative strangers include six people I haven’t seen or heard from for 15 years when we all left school, and meeting these guys again has been a particularly interesting experience; people I remember as teenagers are, like myself, now mid-30s adults with partners, houses, children and careers. We are all grown up and have, variously, settled into our own lives embracing or denying our dreams along the way. I suddenly feel confronted by my own years, but it is comforting to be able to describe achieving my teenage ambitions before turning my life upside-down and embracing a career neither I, nor especially they, even contemplated I would take.

Conversely, I am also enjoying the freedom of being able to lock my door and spend time in my gorgeous hotel room chilling, reading, watching films and dozing without feeling like I’m depriving myself of holiday ‘experiences’. It is this freedom which has taken my reservations about this trip; all the cost, socialising, old-faces and Greek heat, and made it feel like proper Jams-time.