Lucky to be here book

The title of this book (& web site) comes from the fact that I am extremely lucky to be here.
The luck came in many forms, but there were two major ones. The first was meeting Gabi in Freiburg and her mention of the name Skiathos at a point in my life where I could have gone anywhere. Had this meeting not happened, the course of my life would definitely have been totally different. Better, perhaps? I cannot imagine so, but who knows?
The second piece of luck was surviving being electrocuted with over 20,000 volts of electricity. How I survived this, I will never know. This is described in detail in the chapter called “Fun”, so I won’t go over it again here.
Lida and I have always felt lucky. So many things could have gone wrong - but didn’t. We hadn’t set out with a specific plan in mind and often just played it by ear, letting our intuition guide us. Mostly it proved to be the right thing to do, and the few mistakes we made were lessons to guide us on to alternative paths. Luck is a strange thing, and can cut both ways, but we have always availed ourselves of opportunities if they presented themselves. I am a firm believer in not planning too much but waiting to see what life presented us with, and then the next logical move was usually pretty obvious. Of course, luck is not without risk, but if you ignore luck, it will probably have its way in the end. Always best to go for it, say I.
So, life goes on and is always changing. Like all things, this is good and bad. We have always tried to retain all the good things from the past and combine them with any good things that the present brings. Keep the good traditional values that enhance our lives, not hamper them, add the positive aspects of all the new tech and science that daily change our lives, while rejecting the bad uses that some of that tech and science can be put to. I am now in my early 70’s and Lida is only 18 months behind me. However, we still enjoy Skiathos immensely and try to keep as fit as possible, while recognising that there are some things that we can no longer do.
Skiathos itself has changed in many ways. It is a tourist island and is very dependent on that income. An awful lot of development has gone on, again, some good, some bad. Some of the most beautiful beaches are now dominated by large hotels or tourist complexes, and it is a pity not to have such easy access to these beaches as we had before. I don’t think that there is any way I could get my windsurfing kit down to Banana Beach any more (assuming I was able to use it!). Still, there are a lot of un-spoilt beaches left, you just have to make a bit of extra effort to get to them. The magic that I found here is still here, but you have to dig a bit deeper to find it. Then again, we have the whole winter to enjoy the island without tourism, when most of the people in the tavernas and tsipouratheka are locals enjoying spending the fruits of their labours in the summer. The locals work very hard in the summer; businesses need to be open 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, and there is barely time to have an hour or twos nap in the midday heat. Fortunately, we never worked directly in the tourist industry (although nearly all our income was a spin off from it) and managed to (mostly) choose our own hours of work.