Carefully Crawling To Meteora

Monday 19^th June

With the temperature already hovering on 25C, we left Camping Delphi around 9:30am, drove down the hill towards Atria and then started the winding, wiggly road north. The GPS told us that the 220-kilometre journey would take us 3 hours 37 minutes, but we knew it would be longer than that for us.  At one point we were heading for Gorgopotamus, which sounded worrying to me, and we were already worried because the reversing camera had stopped working. And yes, it did take longer.

We managed to top up the depleted fridge at an almost inaccessible Lidl supermarket; you couldn’t turn left into the access road, and you couldn’t turn right after we had doubled back to the access road. You had to drive through the village and turn left down one of the very narrow streets onto a back road. We were both pissed off and angry by the time we got to its car park. But there was more to be pissed off about yet.

After crawling through the centre of Volos (no signs to the ring road), then waiting a while at extensive road works in Agria, the much-dreaded event happened. A warning message came up on the dashboard accompanied by beeps. Just like last year, it said check the manual; within which we already knew that there is, of course, no mention of the warning. Four kilometres down the road we checked into Camping Hellas.  We had already picked this campsite as it had been awarded one of the top ten in Greece last year, but yet again it was another higgledy piggledy campsite of dirt and weeds. Sorry Sue, was it ‘ethnic’, or ‘authentic’.  The beach was a thin strip of gravel almost completely covered with people on sunbeds.  We didn’t bother.  We managed with difficulty to squeeze into our allotted pitch between an English couple and a German couple who didn’t get up and move their washing rack to make it easier for Rodney to manoeuvre. It took a lot of back and forth, avoiding low hanging olive tree branches, plus the Germans washing rack.   And then we had to manoeuvre a bit more to get Reggie level so that we could sleep flat.  

Have we upset the gods or are we struggling through a Greek tragedy?

I’ll admit to tears dribbling down my cheeks yet again as we sat and calculated our options for breaking down again, just like last year. The English couple told us that the ferries were fully booked, they had already tried and failed to change the date of theirs, so even if we could get to Igoumenitsa, we wouldn’t be able to change our booking. We googled for a Fiat garage in Volos and worked out that if we had to leave Reggie again, the nearest airport was on Skiathos Island, a four-hour ferry ride from Volos. But we would also need to buy suitcases …… again.

 Tuesday 20^th June

Another sleepless night was followed by a morning decision to drive towards Volos, see what happened and if no warning came up, we would push on to Meteora and see how close we could get towards Igoumenitsa.  With our hearts in our throats and our fingers crossed, we set off.   At 9:45 am we got to Volos, then kept going to Larissa, constantly watching the dashboard and listening for beeps.  The good news was that we crawled our way west across Greece and made it all the way to Camping Kastraki set beside the fascinating rocks of Meteora.  We tucked Reggie under the shade of big leaved trees and thanked our lucky stars that no warning lights had flashed up and that we had got this far.  We might sleep a little better tonight.

Wednesday 21^st June

Exiting Camping Hellas, we turned left and drove up through the Meteora area.  Geologically and historically it is quite stunning. There are around 60 columns of rock; some of them rising up to 300 metres high and perched on top of a few of them are monasteries. How on earth they managed to transport the building materials to the top of these rock pillars, I have no idea. It’s almost magical.  At one point in time there were 24 monasteries, but now there are only 5 left inhabited by monks or nuns. Originally the only access was by means of very long ladders or by baskets suspended from winch-drawn ropes, but now there are steps cut into the rock face; making it a little easier, but exhausting.

We drove to the parking area, about a 10 minutes’ walk from Megalo Meteoro and joined the queue to enter. This was the first of the monasteries to be built back in 1356. The church inside was quite small but every surface was decorated and, like so many in Greece, it was filled with chandeliers and brass lanterns. The ‘Folklore Museum’ seemed quite curious, perhaps the name was lost in translation because it was filled with lots of photos and paintings about World War II.  Definitely not what we expected to find in there.

We were probably only there for less than an hour, then it was back down the steps and up the road to Reggie. After that, we drove around to the various viewpoints, hopping in and out of the van to take lots of photos. We left the Meteora area around midday and drove over the mountains of central Greece, still clinging to the hope that we would make it to the coast.

We knew we had over 40 kilometres to reach the motorway from Kalabaka but hadn’t realised it would be another exhausting road of twists and turns and hairpin bends. The views were nice. We were very glad to reach the slip road onto the motorway, although then the views weren’t so nice. The first 30 kilometres were inside tunnels, with only short glimpses of daylight between. But we continued being relieved that we were still a rolling tortoise.  Camping Drepanos was the closest campsite to the Igoumenitsa port that we could find.  It’s beside a very busy beach and we have three days to wait for our booked ferry crossing to Bari, Italy.