Sleeping at the wheel

 Today was travel day, very boring kids, very boring, we tried to go to bed early and not drink too much, the call on the road was 6:15, so JW got up at 5 and started getting ready, while I tried to ignore her and get as much asleep as I could knowing full well I had a 2 hour drive to the airport and then a 5 hour drive to Ioanninna.

It didn’t work, the sleep wasn’t there, so I got up and show our last pictures in Sougia, on the west side the moon and on the east side the rising sun.

It’s not my bad to drive in the dark on the crazy roads of Crete, so lucky for us, the sun was coming up hard as we packed up the car and headed north.  We had the entire road to ourselves except for random flocks of goats just chilling.  They mostly ran at the sight of the car, and as we approached the top spot, there were some really cool clouds just hanging out on the mountain tops.  It was beautiful.

We headed down the other side and it looked like we were coasting into the airport until we hit Chania traffic, which is a thing, tiny town and all, and limped into the airport about 5 minutes before 8, dropped off the car and headed into the airport.

Of course our plane was a tad late, and we got to Athens about 30 minutes late, headed to the car rental spot and checked out some bullshit VW POLO???  It’s fine.  We headed north about 11 and planned on stopped about 1 to get gas and eat something.  When 1 approached I pulled off at an exit to get gas and we had terrible crap from some hillbilly coffee shop.  3 minutes later on the highway, a real rest area appeared and got them out the hillbilly crap and got some really food.  Not much better.

The road to Ioanninna is long and treacherous, at one point JW asleep and me barely wake, I thought we were done for, I hit a cone on the side of the road and knocked the fog light out on the rental.  Oh shit.

We continued on and reached Meteora and got a couple picts before continuing on.

The highway ended and we wound up on some crazy mountain road, I wish you could have seen it, the valley was miles below and everywhere as green as Missouri, the actual opposite of Crete, which though green was not this lush.  We got being a truck and slowed to a crawl before coming back out on the high way and finally arriving at our desination.

Ioanninna is a college town, mining town, built around a huge lake, which is protected, so nobody can build houses on it.  There is a trail that goes all the way around, and our hotel, a giant tub of crap, is about 1 k from the actual city.  They put us on the bottom floor and the view from our balcony is basically trees.  We paid for a lake view, this is not it.

I went outside and crammed the broken fog light back into place and we walked down to the town.  It was gorgeous, there were people walking everywhere, they looked happy,and the town archecture was unlike any we’ve ever been.  But this is northwestern Greece, practically Albania, and the cultures here is Eastern European through and through.

We thought it was going to rain, but it did not, and we had a fairly ok meal at Balsamico, it was fine not great, and then walked through the town in awe of all of the people on a Wednesday night and the closed shops that looked run down.

On the way back we stopped at a shop called Bear Brothers, and befriends the bartender, a 17 year old kid who wanted to practice his English and his mute friend George who was sweet as could be.

The walk home was long and dark.

Tomorrow we explore the villages and bridges of Epirus.