Today, we were scheduled to check out of our hotel in Athens and head to Kalambaka, the town nearest to the world famous monasteries of Meteora. We finished our breakfast and got ready before the rental car representative came over to hand us the keys to our rental car. For some strange reason, my name was given to him as "Zicasso", so he greeted me with a "Good Morning, Mr Zicasso". I was puzzled for a bit but I realized why he made the mistake because "Zicasso" is the name of the site that I used to initiate my Greece trip planning exercise. Zicasso is a travel agent aggregator services that connects me to various travel agents and I can pick one among them. I ended up picking SIVA as the travel agent for our trip. More about that in a later blog. After he realized the mistake, he corrected my name on the rental agreement and we were ready to head out. We got a Jeep Avenger SUV with only 3400km on it.
Since it was a weekend (Saturday) morning, there wasn't much traffic even on the local roads. Soon, we were on the A1/E75 that goes from Athens to Thessaloniki. Driving was comfortable except for the weird changes in the speed limits on the highways that I mentioned in an earlier blog. It took me a while to figure out how the cruise control buttons work but once I got the hang of it, I could drive for long stretches of time with cruise control turned on because there was very little traffic to account for.
We took the exit from the highway very close to Kalambaka and made our way towards an intermediate stop in Theopetra. A cave in Theopetra is the site of discovery of human presence from the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic time periods. Footprints, tools, skeletal remains and weapons have been found here and are preserved in a nearby museum. The cave itself is quite small and we were able to finish seeing everything in it in about 15 min. We went to the museum next and were fascinated by the exhibits we saw, so we spent about 45 min there.
From Theopetra, we went to our hotel at Monastiri Guesthouse and checked in. The pool looked very inviting on a very hot day but it was very crowded so we decided to go for a walk through the downtown area of Kalambaka. The hot day was giving way to a bit of cloudy weather and a strong breeze, hinting at rain in the offing. After walking around for a few minutes and a little bit of research, we decided to try some vegan pizza in Pizza Fiesta. While we were waiting for our garlic bread and pizza, it became extremely windy and stuff started flying around. Waiters hurried to clear prepped tables, remove tableware, etc to prevent further damage. It took a bit of time for our food to arrive and we took our time to eat slowly, so it was getting close to dusk by the time we headed back towards our hotel. The person who checked us in to the hotel had told us about an "observation deck" to view the sunset, so we headed there in the car. It was a winding road that kept climbing up a mountain behind the rock pillars of the Meteora monasteries. It was still very cloudy and windy, so we felt like there was no way that a sunset would be visible but we decided to continue anyway. There was quite a crowd of people at the observation deck, which turned out to be a rocky outcrop where we had to do a bit scrambling to reach the edge from which there was an astounding (and slightly scary) view of the entire Meteora landscape with only a deep valley separating us from them. There was a fairly sheer dropofff from where we were standing and it was extremely windy (think 40mph winds) which made keeping our balance quite tricky. We hung around there, taking in the breathtaking beauty of the place. By then, we had also realized that a sunset would not be visible because of the thick cloud cover. I didn't want to drive through winding roads back to the hotel in the dark, so we decided to head back before the official sunset time. There wasn't much to do back in the hotel, so I caught up for a bit on my blog and hit the sack.
No comments:
Post a Comment