Broken

Hey there.

A new and improved version of this post can be found by clicking here.

 I’ve upgraded this blog to make it more interesting and user-friendly. It has a new name – Down Unknown Roads – and a new address (www.downunknownroads.com).

You’ll find all the old posts (although a small few have different names), and our continuing adventures are now featured there for you to enjoy.

Thank you for coming to this site, and I hope to see you Down Unknown Roads. Ciao XX Bev.

 

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The great John Lennon wrote ‘life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans’, and never has this been more true than in the last few months. Let me explain.

The last time you heard from me, we were pooltling up through France with a limping RV and a sense of desperation. We were hurrying to get back to the UK to find out what was wrong with our vehicle, but because of various attempts to get it fixed en route, we did pause briefly at some lovely places.

BEAUNE

Beaune has a fantastic old hospital that was built in 1443 by Nicholas Rolin, the Chancellor of Burgundy. This was a man determined to get himself and his family into Heaven, and the way he saw to do that was through charity to the poor. But not for him a few token donations, oh no – he went the full monty and built this extraordinary and thoughtful building.

He deliberatly chose a wealthy town with lots of benefactors he could sting for money, and provided private rooms that they could pay for when they themselves were sick. He located the courtyard of the hospital over a river so that there was always clean water available, and oversaw the design of every single detail, down to the silver cups the patients drank from.

He used a gifted vineyard to produce wine that is still auctioned every year to cover the running costs, and established a religious order so that the nuns could care for the sick (they were also tasked with baking 80 loaves of bread at five every morning to distribute to the poor).

He established a state-of-the-art pharmacy, and had it written into the charter that only his family, or people nominated by his family (commoners included) could run the hospital, denying any chancer from the opportunity of using it to turn themselves a profit. But the main principle was that no-one, however poor, was to be denied treatment.

The hospital ran until the 1970’s, but it’s now a museum (the patients transferred to a more modern hospice), and I hope Rolin and his family are where they wished to be.

PIERREFONDS

Slightly further north, Pierrefonds Castle is so perfect it doubled as Camelot in the TV series of Merlin, as well as featuring in Highlander and The Man in the Iron Mask.

Originally built in the twelfth century it did it’s job and got besieged, falling so elegantly into ruin that, in 1832, Leopold de Saxe-Coburg Gotha, the first King of the Belgians, got married there. And when Napoleon III visited in 1850 he quickly ordered it to be ‘restored’ as his summer residence, although ‘reimagined’ would be a better term.

The castle overlooks a cute little town built around a boating lake, so it is definitely worth a quick visit.

Anyway, we had no luck solving our motor problems, so we struck off to the excellent Baie de Somme Aire for our last night, and took the Eurotunnel home.

BACK IN THE UK

One of our new campsite mates had told us about Doctor Dave, an RV fixing legend from up near Wolverhampton, so we booked Georgie in with him for a full medical. Knowing this would take some time, we’d arranged to visit relatives while Dave fiddled about in Georgie’s oily bits.

This was all planned by me with military precision. I’d booked Airbnb’s, and contacted everyone we wanted to visit, found out when they were available, and then worked out a logical sequence of travel. Steve hates all this, so I spent days sorting it for us.

But that Lennon-y thing about life? Well, this is where PLANS and LIFE really started to fall out.

I should have been warned when I spent some time with Sky, my little toddler granddaughter. She’d become fascinated with my glasses and asked me what they were for. I said that Nana’s eyes didn’t work very well and they needed some help. She considered this carefully for some minutes, then came to the obvious conclusion – ‘You’re broken’, she said. And I stupidly thought she just meant my eyes.

POOR NIBBLES

To start with, we’d dropped Nibbles, my smart car, into our usual place for MOT with ‘Uncle’ Chris, but then she failed on emissions. Several times. We had to a ask the question, was the car actually worth getting a new catalytic converter? And we decided that ok, yes, better the devil you know. So a new one was ordered and would arrive in time to be fitted just before we left the UK again.

We hired a car, and checked on Georgie – Doctor Dave reckoned she was probably ok now, but he’d never found what the problem was. He’d found lots of other potentially bad problems and fixed them tho, so it was all good.

Time was now running short and the car finally got through it’s MOT. We picked it up and my first thought was, ‘what the fuck have you done to my car?‘ She drove like a mule whilst making a noise like a steamroller. Then she started conking out and losing power, just like Georgie. Oh no, no, no. Back she went to Uncle Chris at the garage. He ‘fixed’ it twice more, but still the problem kept recurring.

Steve collected Georgie and put her in storage nearby to us, where he met Nerdy Chris, another car nut. He said he’d take a look at Nibbles for us and give us a second opinion.

Well he was horrified at the work that had been done. He could see what the problem was and could fix it, but in his view, we probably hadn’t needed a new Cat Converter anyway, as a sensor was disconnected and giving false readings. It was a total botch-job, and there was stuff all over the place.

We had now paid more than the car was worth to have it fixed by Crappy (no more Uncle) Chris, and then we shelled out some more so that Nerdy Chris could sort it. Finances were becoming a major concern.

THE UNEXPECTED

But we have always been lucky, and it didn’t desert us now. Steve got offered the chance of 3-6 months contract work back at his old workplace in Bristol. Yippee – that would sort us out and take up the deficit. Plus, our old neighbours, near Bath, very, very kindly offered us somewhere to stay while he worked (we couldn’t stay in Georgie because most campsites move you on after a month, and our home address in Southend was too far away). We were able to repay their hospitality a bit by dog-sitting for them when they went on holiday to Oz.

 

So now we were temporarily benched. I got this feeling though, a very strong intuitive sense, that there was a reason why we were supposed to be in Britain at this time, and I waited for it to manifest itself.

A check-up at the doc’s revealed that my blood pressure had shot up: was this the reason? So that I had time to get down to my  Healing Centre at Queen Camel and get some work done on myself? I’d certainly felt pretty rough since that drive up from Greece through the snow, and my CFS was in overdrive, so maybe.

Then my eldest son, Joe, came and asked for help to sort out some issues in his own life. Was this it, perhaps? So that I could be nearby to give him the support he needed?

ACTUALLY, NO.

I found out the reason on the morning of 31st July, when Steve got a couple of texts from Sam, our youngest son. They read:-

‘Hey Dad’

‘Funny story’

‘I definitely’

‘Broke my back last night’

I mean WTAF!!!!

He’d had too much to drink (yes, I know – we’ve all been there) and thinks he was trying to find a shortcut home. Anyway, he remembers hanging off some railings, when he lost his grip and dropped 30 feet. He fell long enough to consider, ‘this is further than I expected, I should have landed by now’! Thankfully, because of his rag-doll drunkenness, he bounced at the bottom and, although he burst a Thoracic Vertebrae, his spinal cord was uninjured.

He will fully recover – but he’ll be in pain, fairly incapacitated, and in a back brace for some time. Almost exactly the amount of time that we’ll be in Britain for, in fact, because he currently needs someone to put his socks on for him, etc. Mystery solved.

He’s making good progress, but it is slow. This is him now, in the steampunk corset. And quite possibly high on painkillers.

Of course, being young, tech-savvy, bed-bound and bored witless, the first thing he said to me was, ‘your blog looks awful’ (and I am para-phrasing). I accept that I am not exactly cutting-edge in my thinking, and I definitely struggled when he gave me a questionnaire asking how I defined my brand and saw it’s location in the market place. Then he said a lot of things that involved acronyms and initials (in capital letters, obviously) and I pretended to understand.

The upshot of this is that my next blog posting will have a new look, and maybe a new address to boot. I will let you all know if the details change, but until then, thanks for reading, and happy autumn to you all. Ciao xx

Another day, another car park

Hey there.

A new and improved version of this post can be found by clicking here.

 I’ve upgraded this blog to make it more interesting and user-friendly. It has a new name – Down Unknown Roads – and a new address (www.downunknownroads.com).

You’ll find all the old posts (although a small few have different names), and our continuing adventures are now featured there for you to enjoy.

Thank you for coming to this site, and I hope to see you Down Unknown Roads. Ciao XX Bev.

 

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There are patterns in any life that have a predictability to them, a sense of normal consequence, an inevitability. Take, for example, the look on people’s faces when I tell them that, for a significant part of my time, I travel around Europe in a large, American, RV. I have always interpreted it as a mixture of surprise and excitement, with a genuine delight for me that is sometimes tinged with happy envy.

But I’ve been living this life for a while now, and I wonder if I am mistaken: perhaps that look actually means, ‘Shit, you’ve no idea what you’ve let yourself in for, have you, girly? Rather you than me’.

They might not be wrong – allow me to elaborate on some misconceptions I once foolishly had.

We can go anywhere we want.

Er, no. Not in our particular van, Georgie.

Can’t go down narrow roads, under low bridges, or over 6 ton limit ones. Can’t go into large towns with complicated one-way systems, or through tiny villages with chicanes at either end.

Can’t do really sharp corners in less than a 15-point turn, or go up very steep hills at any speed greater than 8 miles an hour. When we do, we worry all the time that Georgie’s not going to make it, and that we’ll have to attempt that 15-point turn, on a mountain road, with a sheer drop to one side.

Can’t park on sharp inclines because our levellers can only redress this a certain amount, and if it’s too far out of whack, we can’t open the slide-out without the risk of Georgie tipping over onto her side. Plus, the bath won’t drain, and the water pump keeps freaking out because all the water in the tank has gone to the other side. And how does a water pump freak out? Well, it sort of screams.

Also, can’t park on grass if it’s likely to rain because… this.

We can just camp where we like.

Again, no, not if we want any services. Like a laundry or wifi.

I recently watched a film starring Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland: they played an elderly couple who just took off in their old camper van. One morning, Donald’s character (who was ill) wet the bed, and Helen promptly stripped the bed to wash the sheets. Then they drove off along the highway, and I spent the rest of the film wondering where the hell she’d hung that sheet to dry. Seriously, where? It never appeared again and, can I just say, her sink was the size of a walnut.

As for wifi…

Before we left England we were under there impression that McDonalds always had wifi. To which, yes they do, but its speed is slow to impossible, and it is also restricted, so that I can never get to this blog, for example. So when we are a bit off-grid, most of our time is spent wifi hunting, which, in many ways, is the safari of the 21st century.

We went to Menton, a perfectly gorgeous little town in the south of France, just near the border into Italy. An artist friend of ours has been going there for years and his descriptions of it are utterly enchanting. I pictured myself wandering along the sun-speckled promenade, before stopping at a delightful little bistro and being served croissants and coffee by a super-slim, dark-eyed, waitress.

But in reality? Yes, it was very pretty, and yes, we raced down the promenade, but mostly we needed to go online in order to pay our bills and check our bank balance.

After much dithering about we found a cafe that advertised wifi – but, frankly, that was just boasting. In two hours I only managed to upload three pictures onto my already-written-in-Word blog, and I was close to kidney failure from all the coffee. The super-slim waitress had become super-surly, and my legs had fallen asleep.

We can leave behind all the responsibilities of a house.

If you want to know about ‘responsibilities’, just try taking a week’s worth of wee with you, everywhere you go. After Menton, we tried to find an Aire that had the right facilities, because our waste was nearly at critical mass, and we were running off to the public bogs every chance we could in order not to cause overflow. Our water had run out, too, so we were making do with a bucket and cup to hand-flush the loo at night, and a couple of bottles of bought water for drinking.

And then Clumsy Week happened. You all know about Clumsy Week, right? Those days when everything you touch breaks, snaps, fuses, or is smashed? Just imagine when that happens in a van, with limited tools, or space to store spares.

Imagine, also, that you are probably some distance from the shop or the repair person that is needed to solve the problem (if you even have a clue as to what shop that is, of course, because you are somewhere foreign and remote, and DIY is not universal). Trying to explain to the only person you can find with even a smattering of English, in the unpronounceable village miles from nowhere that you’ve fetched up in, that you just need to buy a small rubbery thingy, with a hole in it, about so big, or possibly a sort-of gromity whatsit, is nowhere near as easy as it sounds.

On Clumsy Week I basically broke everything, including our door handle, roller blinds, glassware and taps just by looking at them, I swear. Our normally functioning leisure batteries decided to go on strike, and however many times Steve re-did the wiring, nothing happened. When he climbed onto the roof to check the solar panels, the ladder broke away from the back of the van.

Ergo, we had no lights, and the fridge and freezer had to be turned off. I located a box of candles I’d intended to use for mood-lighting rather than emergencies, but they’d been stored too near a heating duct, and they’d all melted together to form one, long, wobbly candle, with several night-lights and a glass holder sticking out the side.

We couldn’t turn on the heating because the fan wouldn’t work without electricity, and our generator is too noisy for built-up areas. Plus, and God knows why, our steps suddenly decided not to retract, so we couldn’t move anywhere anyway.

We will see places we never knew existed.

Well now, this one is true, as long as we’re talking car parks. Georgie’s too big for supermarkets, but Chinese Shops don’t seem to mind us. Motorway Truck Stops are usually free when abroad, and a much better place to stay now that we’ve learned to park as far from the refrigerated trucks as possible (they literally chunder all night long).

But we were still having the same trouble with Georgie breaking down all the time that had been plaguing us since taking on fuel in Albania. Some of our desperation for wifi was so that Steve could find out what was wrong. Research suggested we needed to source the right fuel filter. This entailed locating mechanics who worked on diesel trucks, and hoping that our Chevy engine wouldn’t confuse them too much.

So the Renault truck garage forecourt at Beaune was home for a little while (no picture, it’s too depressing), as was the Scania truck version at Montelimar (where we were locked in at night). My daily view was now of burly, grease-stained, middle-aged men, with sloppy trousers and butt-cracks (FYI the Czechs call these coin boxes – isn’t that brilliant?) using noisy tools and glaring at me a lot. Ah, the romance.

It will be wonderful to drive along without a care in the world.

Until the sodding Mistral gets you. Again.

The Mo Farrah of the wind world, it rips up through France looking for old RV’s to scare the bejesus out of. Apart from the alarming rocking from side to side along roads that favour ditches over hedges, there is the awning that flaps itself into unrolling and tearing, and the outside lockers that burst open, ready to spill all your shit under other trucks tyres. If I weren’t driving behind in Nibbles, I dread to think how much damage would be done, and how much stuff left littered across Provence.

It will be an adventure.

Well, this just makes me snort tea out of my nose.

So why do I do it?

Why do I travel around knowing that Another day, another car park is a pretty adequate description of my life?

Because even though most Aires and Sostas do turn out to be the corner of a car park, this is often better than it actually sounds. Okay, it’s not the romantic view down a vine-covered Italian slope that I once envisaged, but it can often be quite near a beach or other local landmark.

The following were all in the space of a week or so. This one, at Coucy-le-Chateau-Auffrique, had a nice ruin on a hill to gaze at (ooh look, there’s Nibbles, my Smart car)…

…and this one overlooked a river.

Here we had an interesting view of some troglodyte houses…

…and this was in the car park of a vineyard and wine warehouse. With free wine tasting. Nom nom.

And where else but in a car park would we have met Bid and Ger, the Irish couple just starting out on their year’s journey, and who write the Facebook blog, Pilatesinavan? Super nice.

Or see the trucker obsessed with Joan of Arc?

Or have the wonderful opportunity to understand, to really understand that it is not where you are, or even where you are going that matters: it is how you travel.

And – if you are lucky enough – who you are travelling with (like a man who’ll wear this hat because his granddaughter wanted him to).

NEXT TIME: The story of the postman and the stumbling block. Thanks for reading, and ciao xxxx

Unexpected Italy

Hey there.

A new and improved version of this post can be found by clicking here.

 I’ve upgraded this blog to make it more interesting and user-friendly. It has a new name – Down Unknown Roads – and a new address (www.downunknownroads.com).

You’ll find all the old posts (although a small few have different names), and our continuing adventures are now featured there for you to enjoy.

Thank you for coming to this site, and I hope to see you Down Unknown Roads. Ciao XX Bev.

 

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Ah, the romance of Italy; the beauty of Venice, the pomp of Rome and the cypress-speared vistas of Tuscany, all punctuated by the sharp scent of basil, the tang of olives, and the cool wash of wine from an earthenware jug. Then there’s the lemons, large as oranges, from the Amalfi coast, and the wonderful, mad, gesticulating language, the ancient architecture, and the imposing ruins. I love all the towers, piazzas, and pavement cafes, the frenzied markets bursting with colour, and the extravagant churches leading into cool, calming cloisters, echoing with whispered penitence and the chime of bells. Given a choice of where I’d like to be, Italy is the word that spills from my mouth before I’ve even had a chance to think about it.

But…

…that’s in summer.

And this was February. When the Beast from the East had been chucking its weight about all over Europe (yes, I know it’s May, but I’ve had no internet, so I’m still on catch-up blogs).

So far I’d made it to Trieste in my unheated car, only to be told I needed to carry on driving another 165 miles to Ferrara, in the hope (note – not the certainty) that they’d have the part to fix my heater there. So I girded my loins (mostly in many layers of fabric and a hot water bottle) and drove to the area around Ferrara.

Which is where we found something unexpectedly nice: FREE aires, or sostas, as they are called here. And the word FREE sometimes applies, not just to the parking space for your campervan, but also to the water and electricity!!! Well bend me over backwards and call me Susan, how great is that?

The first one we stayed at was at Castelgulielmo, in the car park of a cemetery. The services were all free, and there was a little shop in the village where you could buy necessities.

Like water.

Because the drinking water had been cut off in case of freezing.

But even if it hadn’t, I still wouldn’t have wanted to drink it as it tasted like liquid Savlon. Not being funny, Italy, but for a country that prides itself on its food and drink, you should pay a little more attention to the basics.

This is where we met Mitia – a nice chap, from Slovenia, with a gorgeous Boxer dog. He had the campervan opposite to us and came over for a beer and a chat. He said he never worried about the security aspects of travelling alone because he’d been trained in a particular Martial Art when he was in the military.

If I even touch Steve, I am in BIG trouble, he said.

So, basically, you’re classed as a weapon? I quipped, (I know my humour doesn’t generally transcend language barriers, but I can’t always stop myself).

But he said Yes, and nodded very solemnly, clearly pleased that I’d got such an accurate grasp of the situation.

We went for dinner at a local pizza restaurant where, as usual, we were the only diners apart from the owner and his wife, who’d settled at another table and were watching a quiz show on the telly. While we all ate, Steve and I tried to guess the quiz show questions by the intonation of the voices and the looks on the contestants’ faces. Our twenty or so words of Italian weren’t quite up to the job, but we got so involved in our little ‘game’ that I began to think I knew some of the answers and started shouting at the telly.

This backfired slightly, as the owner (mistakenly thinking we actually understood it) turned the volume up for us, and then spent the rest of the show making incomprehensible comments to us about the contestants, the compere, or the results. Best I could do was nod, and try to intuit whether I should look appalled, amused, celebratory, or disappointed. I might have said Yay too many times.

They were a lovely couple, though. He used to be in a blues band in the 60’s, and there were framed photos of them on the wall – all long hair, and Afghan coats, and embroidered waistcoats. There was probably a flute. There usually is.

His wife showed us YouTube footage of them performing recently at Deltablues, as the Caledonia Popexa Blues Band. Then he got his guitar out and played us Blackbird by The Beatles.

The next day, inspired by Italian cuisine, Steve went to the supermarket and bought back a packet of ravioli. He hadn’t a clue what was in it though, so I asked him what the picture on the packet showed – the Italians are usually helpful that way. Er, meat, he said? Something red, anyway. He showed me the packet; it was radicchio. Which is lettuce. Steve bought lettuce ravioli. (To be fair it tasted great, but that might have been down to the fifty million things I put in the sauce, including meat).

By now my car was booked in to have the heater fixed the following week, so we moved to another sosta, this time at Migliarino. It was situated in a car park, next to a rowing club, that had lots of strange, sea-themed sculptures. Here we met Frederik, the local beggar. Most days he would stand, quietly and respectfully, outside the Coop and Steve liked to make sure he always had some change for him.

Frederik told us that he came from Nigeria three years ago and had no intention of going back because he liked the cold. He gave Steve his CV, which described him as an agricultural engineer and farm worker. I’m not sure what he thought we could do, but he liked us, and I suspect it was all he had to give. The following day it snowed heavily, and Steve went to check on Frederik, who cheerfully informed us that he had a mate whose floor he slept on, if it was too cold even for him.

While we were snowed in, Steve got out his Dremmel (not a euphemism) and reproduced the broken part of my windscreen wiper from a tiny rubber gromit that he’d found. It took a couple of goes, but then it worked perfectly. As my friend Anna once said, Steve is a legend.

To celebrate we went out to a local restaurant for dinner. I hadn’t quite realised it was a fish restaurant, of course, and happily asked the waitress to recommend something – but not fish (I wasn’t in the mood, that day). Ooh, the look I got!

She made up for it later by leaving a bottle of Limoncello on the table for us at the end of the meal, and then not charging us for it. I love Limoncello. I prefer to drink it until I can’t actually say it. By the time we left to go home it was just that lubly lemony stuff.

Ferrara itself is a smashing little town, half Renaissance, and half medieval in architecture. Both sides meet in the middle of town by the properly moated Este Castle.

We walked down a street of original medieval archways…

…and then back up past all the renaissance buildings, admiring the door furniture as we went. Lots of lovely knockers (don’t embarrass yourselves).

We passed a strange little park with allotments run by a local co-operative, that sold honey, and some utterly unidentifiable produce, from a log cabin under the trees. And ended our walk at the Diamante Palace, with its studded walls casting impressive, constructivist shadows in the waning light.

And then, car fixed and Ferrara seen, it was time to crack on with our journey home. We drove a long way to a sosta – that turned out to be up too steep a hill and too windy a road for Georgie, our RV, to manage. So we drove further – to a sosta that we found had been taken over by a circus. So we drove further still – and ended up at a sort of lay-by in Vezzano Sul Crostolo.

But the long drive had left tempers, not so much frayed, as completely unravelled. We had a good shout at each other and I huffed off to the bedroom, disgusted, yet again, by the fact that my bedroom door refuses to slam. Steve went for a walk in the nearby woods to cool down.

He came back later and said dear?

Yes love? I said, hoping he’d come to apologise first.

No, he said, deer. Come and see.

And there they were – a whole herd of them in the field next to the van: wild, and skittish, and part of a nature reserve that also boasted wild boar and wolves.

Following them, we found an abandoned cottage that had once boasted a rather fabulous outside loo – complete with bidet and everything. Not like the tiny concrete or wooden shacks I remember from my childhood (FYI I’m not that old, they just hadn’t all been demolished then).

So it seems that some lovely wildlife, and a broken bog is all I need to cheer myself up. I picked daffodils, apologised to my lovely, car-fixing, husband, and went home to cook weirdly-stuffed pasta behind my non-slamming doors.

Next time – the south of France, clumsy week, and that Mistral again.

Greek Moments

Hey there.

A new and improved version of this post can be found by clicking here.

 I’ve upgraded this blog to make it more interesting and user-friendly. It has a new name – Down Unknown Roads – and a new address (www.downunknownroads.com).

You’ll find all the old posts (although a small few have different names), and our continuing adventures are now featured there for you to enjoy.

Thank you for coming to this site, and I hope to see you Down Unknown Roads. Ciao XX Bev.

 

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I spend my life shouting at the telly, which I find it quite therapeutic. I am particularly vocal during films where medieval castles are getting bombarded (I have sons – I’ve had to watch a lot of these) and all the equipment the invaders needed were a selection of big ladders. I mean, for God’s sake, stick some spikes out of the wall why don’t you, or cover the gaps in the battlements with a sodding wrought-iron fence. If all the baddies have to do is climb up and climb in – well just do something, ok? (I’d personally favour a trench full of alligators.)

But the Palamidi Fortress in Nafplio (our local town where we over-wintered in Greece) has actually nailed it, in my opinion. Big strong walls – tick, plenty of bastions surrounding the heart of the fortress – tick, high on a hilltop where you can see the invaders at least a week before they reach you – tick. In fact so high up it has 999 steps that trudge up to it. I’ll say that again: 999 steps.

In Vienna we’d climbed to the top of the tower in St. Stephan’s cathedral, but that was a mere 343 steps. I remember how my thighs complained (as my muscle tone is on a par with my gran’s old knicker elastic), and so before attempting the Palamidi, I did some training. By which I mean I used the stairs whenever I could (but probably no more than 20 at a time) and walked a bit more than usual. So, not that trained, really.

I also waited until Joe came to visit, so he could climb the steps with me. Steve’s medical history includes a quad bypass, two stents and a stroke, so he was getting sent up the long way around, by car, no arguments. But my son Joe is a bit of a mountain goat anyway. As a child he used to shimmy up the walls of the hallway and wait, arms crossed, until you walked below him. Then he’d drop to the ground behind you, giggling hysterically, while you double-checked to see if you’d actually peed yourself.

So, the pair of us set off and, to be frank, my legs were aching on the short walk up the hill just to reach the steps. At about halfway I made Joe stop and come back down a step, so that when we got to the top, we’d actually have done a thousand steps (this is what passes for fun in my head). I had to sit down a lot on the way up, but I could see the walls of the castle getting nearer and nearer and it felt do-able.

And this is where I think the Palamidi architects were so clever, because I reached those walls (having paced myself accordingly) and then found it was merely a bastion – and only two thirds of the way up. Still, literally, hundreds more to do. But I pushed on, got to the gate, paid our entrance fees, and turned a corner only to find … lots more steps. The Palamidi is not flat, it seems.

But it was a stunning view, once blood had returned to my brain. From the top we could see the Bourtzi (which is another fortress, built on a rocky outcrop in the bay, and reachable only by boat). Honestly, these Nafplions knew what they were doing.

Nafplio itself is rather lovely. It was a major stronghold of the Ottoman Empire until the Greek War of Independence, and then it became the capital of Greece (until King Otto decided Athens was everything, and moved there instead). We sat at a café and watched sea bream swimming around by the quayside, and then walked through the narrow streets of the Old Town.

In the main square is a stone lion, which is worth a look, because over the years, children have happily filled the holes that delineate his whiskers with BB gun pellets. And there is another lion carved into a rock face just behind the local Lidl. He’s the Lion of Bavaria and commemorates the sad death of Bavarian soldiers in a typhoid epidemic. However, the locals believed it was death by cucumber (the Bavarians are said to have eaten too many) and consequently call the statue Agouroon (which means cucumber in Ancient Greek).

We visited the Archaeological Museum and I found some more nipple-tweakers and a shocked-looking lady saying, ‘talk to the hand’. Feeling you, sister.

But my favourite was the Folklore Museum, which is a gem of a place – full of wonderful costumes, fabulous painted furniture, and traditional dolls.

I would have killed for this blouse, it had so much detail on it.

And there was this pair of twin dolls in their natty knitted gear. I like to think of them as representing my grandkids, Kit and Sky, if Satan was their dad instead of Laurence.

And that was it for our time in Greece, as we needed to make our way back to the UK to MOT our vehicles, and catch up with family. This meant driving through Albania again and – now that I’d got over the shock of that – I was prepared to review my opinion of the place. Next time I’ll let you know whether or not I did.

P.S. I found so many things about Greece to be brilliantly bonkers that I posted them on Facebook, under the title Greek Moments. If you haven’t seen them, I’ve reproduced a few of them here. I hope they make you smile the way they did me. Ciao xxxx

GREEK MOMENTS:

When you ask, ‘I wonder what’s on at the big screen?’ but this is the size of the cinema…

When even the furniture makes you feel fat…

When the Virgin Mary has had all she can take…

In case you’re not sure which bit of a house the roof goes on…

When the local DIY store caters for all your goat-herding needs…

And the local hardware shop also sells …. yes, it’s wine…

Bit harsh – what’s wrong with the naughty step?

And, finally,

the chap with the impressive arse is painting his own yellow lines on the road.

Cos, why not?

My Olympian moment, and other legends.

Hey there.

A new and improved version of this post can be found by clicking here.

 I’ve upgraded this blog to make it more interesting and user-friendly. It has a new name – Down Unknown Roads – and a new address (www.downunknownroads.com).

You’ll find all the old posts (although a small few have different names), and our continuing adventures are now featured there for you to enjoy.

Thank you for coming to this site, and I hope to see you Down Unknown Roads. Ciao XX Bev.

 

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Travelling in Greece brings to mind the opening lines of Harry Nilsson’s song, Remember:

               ‘Long ago, far away, life was clear, close your eyes…’

Everything here seems to have been glorious but it was all ‘once upon a time’.

It had a good run; from the eighth century BC, right up to when the Romans started getting a bit uppity over eight hundred years later. The first couple of centuries are known as the Archaic Period, and when Steve and I fetched up at Drepano, we were delighted to see a sign for an Archaic Temple just around the corner. Sadly, we were somewhat less delighted when we found it.

The signs had been proud and proclaiming on the main road, but as we’d got closer to the site, they’d become vague, unhelpful, and pointing in distinctly off-hand directions.

When we eventually found it, we understood why – they clearly wanted you to know they had a Temple, but they just didn’t want you to see it.

Because said Temple was, in fact, a triangle of grass with a few rocks and a couple of holes in it, on a slope behind the church. The sort of place where all the rubbish blows, and people dump their old beer cans and Xmas trees, and dogs go to poo. Not very Templey. I genuinely mistook it for a bus-stop.

But who cares, because after the Archaic Period came the Classical Period, and this is when Greece really got its shit together.

MYCENAE

We waited until my son, Joe, came to stay and then we shot off to Mycenae. Here they have three Tholos (or beehive-shaped) tombs, and it’s also where the great golden mask of Agamemnon was found.

Steve made a ‘find’ of his own; scratching in the dirt on a pathway he picked up a tiny piece of painted pottery, circa 1200 BC. Joe adored the serenity of the Tomb of Clytemnestra, with its high, domed roof made of intricately over-lapping brickwork. And, in the museum, I found more of the strange little Grecian figures that I have come to think of as Nipple-tweakers. Happy days.

NEMEA

You’ve heard of Hercules defeating the Nemean Lion? Well, this is where the legend takes place, and we thought it’d be a good place to visit. The story goes that, as the first of his ‘labours’, King Eurystheus sends Hercules off to kill a certain lion that has been causing havoc in the area, and to bring him back the skin as proof.

Fair enough, you think? No, not really – this particular beast has fur that is impenetrable, and claws that can cut through both swords and armour, which just shows what he thinks of Hercules.

Now, the H-man has been told about the lion, but he’s as thick as two short planks and tries to shoot it with arrows, which naturally just ping off. To give him his due, he doesn’t quit, and eventually corners it in a cave and chokes it to death. Round one to Hercules.

But now he has to skin it. Having totally forgotten (again) about the strength of the animal’s fur – it having been, ooh, minutes since the arrows bounced off – he tries to cut it  with a knife. Epic fail. Aha, he thinks, I’ll sharpen my knife with a stone. Fails again. This goes on for some time, until Hercules tries to hack it off with the stone. Not a lateral thinker, our Herc.

By this time the Gods are all placing bets and pissing themselves laughing. Zeus is wiping tears from his eyes, muttering, ‘he’s the gift that keeps on giving’. But Athena has had enough, and drops down to Earth to give him a nudge in the right direction.

‘That’s quite a lion, you’ve got there,‘ she says.

‘I know, right? Got claws that can cut through armour, too. I’m bloody heroic, I am.’

‘Cut through armour, can they? Wow, that’s really sharp.’

‘Yes it is, and now I’ve got to skin it, and look what it’s done to my best knife? It’s all bent up.’

Athena tries again. ‘If only you had something here that was sharp enough to cut through armour – that would do the trick, wouldn’t it?

‘The stone didn’t work either,’ says Herc, completely mystified.

‘Oh for fuck’s sake, use the claws, the claws! Seriously, what is wrong with you?’

And that’s exactly how it happened, and I personally think this story has something that every one of us can identify with.

EPIDAUROS

There’s a sunken city off the coast near Epidauros, which you can swim out to, that’s a couple of thousand years old. So we took a drive out to that, only to discover that neither of us can swim that far, or that deep – not with a snorkel, anyway. So we trollied into the local town and went looking for ice-cream instead.

While I was deciding if mine had ever actually met a strawberry, we got befriended by a lovely young couple and an older chap; Sarah, Patrick and Petyr. They were looking to buy a boat to set up an island-hopping business. Sarah was a Brit who’d gone to the States to study acting, and had then gone on to be a singer/songwriter. She looked about twenty-two. I couldn’t work this out so I turned to Patrick and enquired if she wasn’t too young to have given up on one dream already? She laughed and said she was older than she looked, but he said, ‘I hope she hasn’t given up – I love hearing her sing.’ He looked so totally besotted I nearly hugged him. Best I could do was choke out, ‘Well, he’s a keeper,’ and then float off feeling awed by how sweet they were.

Further up the beach we saw a young lad who’d caught a small octopus for his dinner. Apparently, to tenderise the hard muscles which serve instead of a skeleton, it has to be beaten about fifty times on a rock. When we caught up with this lad he’d been dragging it up and down a well-worn rock for at least half an hour, liberally dousing it in sea-water. He looked exhausted.

Of course, there’s more than just a sunken city here. There’s plenty of other ruins including an amphitheatre, cos you’ve got to see at least one, haven’t you?

BUT OLYMPIA, THO

If you’re not going to Athens (which we are not), then the next best place for Classical Greek stony stuff has got to be Olympia. A lot of the temples fell down in an earthquake, but even seeing the size of the blocks that made up the columns is impressive. I really liked that one of the buildings in the surrounding (massive) complex was said to echo whatever you said, seven times.

They light the Olympic torch here, and you can still run down the original 100 metre(ish) track. So I made Steve run with me, whilst workmen and other tourists looked at us pityingly. So am I now an Olympian? I think I am.

But the best bit for me was the museum – lots of muscles and beautifully draped cloth.

And stuff that was just plain interesting (this little lion probably never met Hercules – he’s too smiley).

 

And how come glassware can survive for over two millennia in the ground here, but every time we get back to England it’s another trip to Ikea for us?

I’ll leave you with this – a photo of me crossing the finish line at Olympia, that totally belies the twenty minutes of red-raced gasping for breath that followed, or gives any hint about the bit in the middle that I had to walk. Thanks for reading. Ciao xxx