Day 12 Sunday September 23rd

After a restless night, thank you Hannah Jenkins for phoning at 3am and Andy’s pet fly for buzzing incessantly, we woke up with the alarm at 7am, showered, packed and set off. Sam ran the distraction whilst Andy returned the corkscrew to the bar as we left……

We followed the coastal road for a few miles, the sun was rising over the town we had stayed in and the sea, all looked pretty cool!!

Made it to Thessalonica for 9.30 ready for some breakfast, however the Greeks don’t seem to get up that early and for the 2nd time since arriving in the country all that was on offer was some toast! Now whether they are pretty rubbish cooks or whether they are extremely modest about there toast we are not sure, maybe it’s a national secrete we are yet to discover…… Being the cultured ‘dudes’ that we are we decided against the voyage of discovery and went to Starbucks!!

Thessalonica was a bit of a let down to be honest, the old bits didn’t seem to be preserved in any way, they just had new build all around them, so we did not stay long and got back on the road.

We were ambling along and happened to glance to our right and there was a big mountain, “There’s lovely” (needs to be said with authentic welsh accent) we thought wonder how big it is??? After consulting the oracle that is our AA map of Europe we discovered it was Mt Olympus so we thought we’d have a look. Turned out it was 2918 meters high which is actually, possibly, nearly 3 times as big as OUR biggest mountain at home! Never….. (again must be said in a dodgy welsh accent)!

Nestled in the foothills of the mountain was the monastery of Dionysus, some old Monk who thought he was quite important….. Allegedly it was built in the middle of the 16 century, but we reckoned it all looked a shiny and new. Aang about abit we thought what’s going on here?? So we purchased the guide book and apparently the Germans bombed it in 1943, and so its all been tacked up again since then! The funniest bit was the last page of the guide book where we are told that the Monks are suing the German government for damages because the Greek government wont cough up any more cash!

The next gem on our road trip through Greece was a place called Meteora. A fantastic mountain range in the middle of Greece, we spent a few moments naming all the mountain and thought one looked like an elephant with a massive great rock on its back. This reminded us of a story that we had heard about 2 elephants in the middle of Africa. Daddy elephant, sent his son Suki to the river to fetch water. “Suki” he said, “go to da river to fetch sum watta”. So off went Suki to look for the river. When he got there he found only a dry river bed so picked up a big stone to take back to his father to prove to him the river was dry. When he got back he said to his father, “I could not fetch da watta from da river, it waz too dry farther”!! Suki’s daddy was so mad that he turned Suki into stone! Hence the rock formation that we saw…..!!!

The next 200 km’s was spent rallying through the middle of Greece’s mountainous centre….. A new road is under construction which we experienced for only 5km’s, the rest was on some wacky racer roads, which obviously Andrew loved and Sam’s car coped with rather well….. We are however now equal on off road near misses, both have had to touch the verge in order to avoid sudden death whilst on mountain passes.

We made it to Iguoumenitas, just over 500 miles west of this morning in about 10 hours……. Our boat to Italy across the Adriatic Sea is full off lorry drivers, probably the ones that Andrew overtook on the mountain pass earlier today!! Basically it’s a sort of cross between a police holding cell and a western 1950’s saloon bar….. We feel right at home but will possibly be in bed before a gun fight breaks out……

Sam wants to say a little something about his first experience “sailing” … he’s never had a cabin before and is very excited… hopefully not too much to sleep! We have a very small, but perfectly well-equipped cabin with bunk-beds! First time since Andy was 6 or so! Can’t wait for bed-time, but right now the Metaxa and beer calls! I had a dream this voyage would be, so different from this hell I’m living…… Name that tune!!!!!!