Wasted Days and Wasted Nights

“This was how it was with travel: one city gives you gifts, another robs you. One gives you the heart’s affections, the other destroys your soul. Cities and countries are as alive, as feeling, as fickle and uncertain as people. Their degrees of love and devotion are as varying as with any human relation. Just as one is good, another is bad.” 

― Roman Payne, Cities & Countries

Lesson Learned: Google maps doesn’t know the difference between a city street, a country road or a goat trail. I mean this literally. A goat trail. We made two attempts (routes) to get to Epicurius to see the UNESCO site and pulled up to a halt on each route when Google attempted to send us across a mountain face gravel trail. Paper maps didn’t help either. A dirt passage looks just like a farm to market asphalt road. Maybe this is the only way to get to the ruins (though that’s not indicated on any guide book), but we weren’t willing to risk damage to the car bouncing over a mountain path to get to the site. Those ruts were wider than a bar ditch. So after 4 hours, we gave up the quest.

Google lets you dictate no toll roads or how to avoid highways, but they don’t seem to understand that goat trails in Greece literally have goats (and sheep) not to mention bad-natured dogs, boulders in the roadway, pot holes deeper than Wildcatter oil wells in the Permian Basin, 800-foot plunges off a roadway with no guard rails, fractured asphalt, and locals staring at you like the banjo player in Deliverance. Live and learn.

Regrets: Nah, we knew there would be days like this. We aren’t on any guided tour.

Go-Day 23, February 14. A not so happy Valentines Day. We set out to visit the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae with plans to go on to hike the Exo Mani. Everything went awry. It was going to be a two-day trek. One to the temple, then on to Kalamata (home of the famous olive) to spend the night and find trail information from an outfitter and then down to Kardamyli for a day of back country hiking. For this we were going to leave our apartment and spend the night away. It was a wasted trip.

After backtracking down a mountain (twice) we limped into Kalamata which is organized like the streets of the Burning Man Festival at midnight after the fire show. Mass confusion. Its not a tourist-friendly town with a city center perfect for sidewalk cafés, sipping wine and discussing the events of the day. It’s a Greek working city with traffic, no parking, confusing streets, Vespas zipping in and out of traffic like mad hornets, and hard to find hotels.

We found a hotel online, threaded our way through 10 feet wide streets, parked 6 blocks away, hauled our over-night kits to the hotel (which was harder to locate than a chocolate Easter Egg at a school for the blind  egg hunt). The entrance looked like the front door to a Brooklyn apartment building where you had to buzz the superintendent to let you in the unmarked front door. Somehow, I expected nothing less after the day we’d had.

The front desk was on the second floor (in Europe that means the third floor, since the street level is Floor zero or ground), the attendant didn’t speak English, and the room was a cross between a women’s prison infirmary and a bed you rent by the hour (Ellen wasn’t in the mood).

Off we went to find the outfitter. Well, that didn’t happen. The sports shops that were supposed to have this information didn’t. But, they sure wanted to sell us some hiking boots. So back to the room we went. It was either go across the street to a bar for about 10 glasses of wine, or cut our losses and drive 2 ½ hours back to Nafplion. The alcohol sounded like the lesser of the two evils to me, but after looking around the bare room with the olive green wainscoting, and the look on Ellen’s face helped me us to decide the drive home didn’t sound like such a bad idea. On the road again.

Made it back to the apartment just after sunset, made pasta, drank some wine and celebrated a subdued V-Day on our own private balcony. Skyped the girls, chalked one up to experience, and decided what we would do next. It turns out, we spent an entire day planning our trip to Crete, booked a ferry, rented a car on the island, two Air BNBs and made hotel reservations for Cairo in April.

Things are still great. I’m not homesick at all. Mary Frances and Mike are moving into our house this weekend, so we’ve no place to go even if we were. Happy Travels.