Blind curves, tight spots
Trip Start
Apr 30, 2008
1
8
31
Trip End
May 31, 2008
Vólos,
Greece
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
In Milies there is one particularly spectacular curve in the middle of the village -- almost 90 degrees and completely blind. You just have to nudge forward and hope. I think it's there to separate the atheists from the believers. I hate it more each time. It feels like Russian roulette.
On Tuesday, we venture further along the coast to the next village. The road changes from a barely passable two-lane to a sort of semi-paved goat path like someone's driveway, with sudden hairpin turns up through the hills above the sea. When you meet another car, one of you (and by that I mean me) has to back up until the road becomes wide enough to cower on the shoulder while the other car squeezes by. This is less entertaining than it sounds. This road makes the one to Vizitas look like an interstate.
Bella has been in a fruitless search for an Internet cafe as she has not been able to make a wireless connection at the hotel with her laptop and she has lots of business to attend to for her travel company. She is growing very anxious, but the next village holds even less promise of a solution. It's no more than a dozen shops and cafes stretched along the narrow road that runs along the beach less than ten feet from the water. We stop at a grocery and buy a bottle of wine and a bottle of Mextaxa and turn back for Afiosos for lunch and a couple of hours with our books on the beach.
Soon, the wind comes up and the skies darken and we pack our things to try to make it back up the mountain before the rain. Our timing is perfect and the skies open up minutes after we are safely ensconced in the cozy Santikos again. Bella has a text message from her son, Roman, explaining how she can get Web access to her e-mail, and spends the remainder of the afternoon working while I sip Mextaxa and read about the intrigues of the Romanov court. The rain peppers the windows of the silent house and splashes from the gutters. Once I hear the tinkle and clang of bells and see an old man leading a parade of goats down a path outside the window. We are now the only guests at the Santikos Mansion and staff has been reduced to one teenage girl who does not speak English. She offers us tea or coffee and later she brings out two small plates of sweet preserved fruit -- apricots, figs, pears and chestnuts in honey syrup. That serves as dinner.
Bella finishes by 8 and we sit talking in the dimly lit lobby over a bottle of wine until very late, the casement windows open to the hush of the mountain night and the sibilance of a gentle rain.
