All the right curves

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  Vólos, Thessaly, Greece
Sunday, May 4, 2008

Another cab ride to the airport to rent a car and we're on the road north by 2 pm in a silver Huyndai minivan that's a couple of sizes too large for me. It's a easy drive on the divided highway and were it not for the slightly less than infallible directions we've been given, it might have been a shorter one, too. The guy at the rental desk had never heard of our destination and it wasn't on the Budget map, but he was kind enough to call the hotel and get some help -- advice like "when you get to Volos, just keep the water on your right." The pin on the map for this entry was the closest Travelpod could come, too. The village is actually to the east on a mountain above the coast.

We follow the first leg of his directions and promptly get lost at the first turnoff. Bella and I share the complete absence of any sort of sense of direction and it quickly becomes more a guessing game than a Saturday afternoon drive. We stop for directions and are told we've come exactly the wrong way from Athens and will need to take a cutoff north to join the National Road to Volos. It's 50k of winding road through the hills and we spend a good 30k of it behind trucks. Cars behind us, less patient, more fearless, jockey for position and pass us and the trucks on blind curves, helping to keeping things lively.

Once on the National Road, it's back to superhighway style and we're in Volos by 7, threading our way through town, trying to stop at most of the lights, dodging drivers who know where they're going and craning our necks to "keep the water to our right." Once we reach the road on the far side of Volos, we watch for a cutoff that will take us to Milies. Beyond that is the village of Vizitas and the hotel.

The road to Milies winds up the side of a mountain. If it were any more crooked, it might turn into a mobius strip. It's also almost wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other. At least that's the way it looks until I squeeze by the first oncoming car. I realize there's enough room for two cars to pass with inches to spare. It's evident that the local strategy for navigating the corkscew turns and getting past other cars is to do it all at speed. We pass innumerable roadside shrines which suggest the limitations of this approach.

We miss the next turnoff to Milies and continue our little amusement park ride to some village in the opposite direction of Vizitas where I stop to ask a group of young guys for directons. None speak English. Always at the top of my game in these situations, I pronounce Vizitas in every way I can think and am met with blank stares. While they argue amongst themselves a bit, I fish the hotel voucher out of my luggage and point to the word Vizitas helpfully. The pronounce it correctly and with much hillarity point out our error and send us back off again in the opposite direction.

It's after 8 when we reach Milies which turns out to be a village of timber, stone and plaster buildings clinging to a cliff. The single road through the town was well engineered for a single wagon or a procession of goats but no one had the foresight to include ignorant Americans in minivans in the masterplan. Some curves are so totally blind that I would tap the accelerator gently enough to nose ahead to see around the curve and often just in time to see another car heading straight at us. I think with practice this might be fun.

Vizitas is 2-3 k. on from there and we pull into a parking slot just off the main drag of approximately 3 shops and two tavernas. I ask for directions to the Santikos Mansion from a couple of guys hanging around nearby and they smile and point straight up. About 150 yards above the lot stands the hotel. Can't drive any closer than where we are, but they say the car is fine where it is and grabbing the first load of luggage we trudge up the steep stone path to a large 19th-century timber and stone house.

We're expected, if quite late, and a young woman shows us to the Icarus suite, two flights up the wooden stairs at the top of the house. Looking through the open leaded glass windows youcan see the Aegean licking the shore 5-7 miles down the mountain below and the lights of other villages scattered throughout the surrounding hills. The ceiling is carved timber. The scent of flowers and pine is carried by the breeze through the muslin curtains. It all feels more like we are staying at a friends' home than a hotel. Next job for me is to go back down the two narrow flights of stairs and the 150 yards of rough stone path (that Bella navigated in heels) to the car to retrieve Bella's impressivley large rolling suitcase and then repeat the trip in the opposite direction. The wheels of her case offer a few complaints as they bump over the stone, but I find a few well-chosen Anglo-Saxon words that make the climb back to the hotel possible.

I greet a couple on their way down. "Hi, I'm Sysyphus."

Dinner after 10 in one of three tavernas nestled together a few hundred yards along another stone path (this one less vertical). I have lamb and fried potatos. Bella, beef and rice. Both of us starving, having had nothing since breakfast. We sip a jug of red wine. In the courtyard below, two neolithic oaks with enormous trunks, their leaves fluttering in the buttery yellow light of the street lamps.

We sleep like the dead.

Breakfast in the sunshine on a terrace outside the house with a sweeping view of the mountains and island-studded sea below. Sweet breads and cakes, eggs, cheese, thick creamy yogurt and honey, frothy apple juice and strong black coffee.

We hike down the road back to Milies under leafy green oaks and pines. The road falls away into thin air on the downhill side. No guard rails to spoil the view. After poking around what there is of Milies we stop for a beer at an outdoor restaurant and head back to Vizitas and the car. The road back through Milies and down the mountain is no less challnging than the night before, but somewhat less scary this time, though I pretty much have to let Bella be the one to enjoy the view. At the foot we head west parallel to the shore through the village of Afissos, find a pebbly beach with an outdoor restaurant, claim two chaise lounges and spend the afternoon reading and watching the sun dapple the blue waters of the Aegean and the misty , watercolor hills of the peninsula that sits on the horizon.

I'm typing in the small lobbly of the hotel on a wireless keyboard on my lap near the top of a mountain in Greece. Wherever you go, you are always on the Net.

Time for cocktails.