Rosy-fingered dawn gave way to an intense morning sun as we wound our way up and down the mountains of the beautiful Pelion peninsula. There are sweeping views of the clear blue water of the Pagasetic Gulf as you round the last few hairpins to sea level, and take the coast road to Milina. It is a village of narrow streets so we need to find a place to park from where we can find Rob and Rachel’s place on foot. The place we find is right next to the beach, just about far enough off the road for safety in the shelter of a seafront building. We have instructions to find the house which conclude:
“200 years up that road/concrete track is our place, two red tiled roofs with a white gate in the middle.” Rob blames auto-correct for the distance, but atmospherically, it is just about right for the road….
Down the steps the other side of the white gate the two old stone buildings under the two red-tiled roofs face one side of a paved courtyard. On the other sides, a picturesque stone ruin 
and a half-tamed garden waiting to be transformed into a cool oasis with splashing water. Perfect. 
The courtyard has orange trees set into the flagstones which entangle their branches overhead to provide shade for eating, drinking, sitting, reading – all the quiet activities such surroundings invite. I chose to sit there to eat apricots with yogurt and honey in the morning. Thank you Rob and Rachel.
The buildings are the ruins of an old olive press and it is the work of Rob and Rachel that has created this quiet haven. One building was completely without a roof but now sports an amazing configuration of beams – built in the Albanian tradition apparently.
The airiness of the white rooms and the metre thick walls kept us cool while we spent three nights enjoying the space of a house and garden after the tininess of the van – a whole bedroom, a truly amazing bathroom, a private garden and a lighting system we still have not quite figured out! The first night we could not get the stove to work and just had to go out to eat:-) At the beach-front Elia taverna we shared the best fava I have ever eaten followed by the best melanzani-type dish for me and cheesy-potatoey Piliortico (?) for Neil. (I would describe it as a Greek version of tartiflette but google search has let me down on this one.) He enjoyed it.
The village fronts the sea with a row of tavernas and the side streets have enough small grocery shops and bakers to meet the needs of the day. And the days are HOT. Swimming becomes a late afternoon activity as the sun begins to set, followed by a leisurely sundowner. 
One morning we go early and find a solitary sleeper on the beach in his bedroll. As people arrive to swim he picks up his bed and walks back to his van – full of fruit and veg which he sets off to sell around the streets. Looks like a nice work – I pursue one of my favourite activities – collecting sea-glass.
The cooker now works – the trip switch was up instead of down (or vice versa) – so I cook on our last night to finish up the bacon and eggs we had had in the van for some time. My fault for being so un-Greek in my repertoire – the hob objected and a startling crack came from under the pan. Horror of horrors – I had somehow cracked the ceramic surface! Mortifying to damage other people’s borrowed stuff! (Follow up – many emails later and Rob’s local house-guru managed to source a replacement and arrange its installation in time for family holidays – thank goodness!) The cat in the window was unmoved throughout.
It came to 16th June and we were now on countdown to our ferry date on 20th. My usual resources showed a real paucity of camper stops and campsites across country from Pelion to Patras and I wanted to see Delphi enroute. Stella said over seven hours drive to get to a campsite at Delphi and it was so hot we were reluctant to be any distance from the sea. Fortunately the ACSI book showed a couple of the campsites near Delphi had swimming pools, but seven hours is still waaay too far in a day. Finally looking in park4night I found a parking spot just back around the top of the gulf – but three hours drive on the windy roads. It is a public beach just at the end of the road from Nea Anchialos – right on the sea with trees.
It rained some more as night drew on so no cooking outside, which we normally do, and yet again we were forced to eat in the local, on-site taverna:-) Lamb chops and chips again for me! Portia nestled damply in the trees below.
Very simple, authentic food they said, as we conversed in Anglo-Greco-Italiano. They had eaten there the night before and were enthusiastic about what they had eaten – phonetically, scored-val-yay with horta. When we got there the owner told us the menu choices were fish or meat and no-one spoke English to explain exactly what was what. The owner phoned her daughter to come and talk to us and she whizzed up a few minutes later. Then it transpired that she had also met the young Greek couple on their walk and they had told her what we should eat: scored-val-yay with horta to start and a plate of small fishes to follow. Horta is very like spinach and both it and the scored-val-yay were delicious. The owner came out and explained how to make the latter with a fair bit of mime and the help of ingredients from the shelf in the kitchen. It seems it is white bread, without the crusts, soaked in oil, a bit of vinegar plus garlic and salt then pressed somehow into a loose paste. Definitely no food processor. We chose fish and each had a plate of lightly fried sardines – with a squeeze of lemon a memorable birthday meal.
guide-book and road signs; Sparta, Arcadia, Thermopylae, Mycenae, each calling us to loiter with the mythical shades amongst the fallen pillars and tumbled stones. But…. we had a rough plan and it is difficult to abandon a plan, however sketchy, and there is always the possibility of next year (when there is not a heatwave). So we decided to leave the third finger of the Peloponnese for another day and make a big leap across the Spartan valley, skirting Tripoli (Tripoli? How did that get in there?) to a spot just around the end of the Gulf of Nafplio in the Argolid. Yes – where Jason and his Argonauts came from!
I needed support going down because my smooth, flat soles were inclined to slip on the marble paving slabs on the paths – brought to a high shine by generations of feet. If you go – wear good grippy trainers. To show the height – you can see the many buses in the car park.
The ancient port of Koroni sits below a Venetian fort towards the tip of the south-west peninsula of the Peloponnese. From Kalo Nero we crossed the mountains from the east coast of Messenia to the west, bypassing Kalamata (where the olives come from) and Ancient Messene (through sheer ignorance). The roads proved a lot less fearsome than they appeared on the map and had great views. Beyond Messini (the new one) fruit and vegetable stalls dotted the roadside – a sack of oranges made its way into the back of the van (4 Euros) together with fragrant tomatoes and courgettes. In the book Camping Koroni claims to be fifty metres from the sea without mentioning they are all vertical. There were steps and a path down the (small:-) cliff to a Taverna right by the sea. The beach was sandy and it was quite a walk to get in above your knees – nice though, with the old town just across the water. It was a pleasant enough site with plenty of shade but I did not take to the high hedges around the pitches – seemed to make it a bit airless after the openness and direct access to the sea of Kalo Nero. The swimming pool was a bonus. 
It was Hot. At about five o’clock we braved the heat and tackled the steep streets of the charming old town. They took their toll!
Refreshing ourselves with a rather sophisticated (and expensive ) ice cream on the harbour front we also yielded to the honeyed blandishments of the mini-baklava in one of the boutique bakeries. A small, well wrapped, selection went into the back-pack for future delectation. The town seems to be well endowed with hardware shops for no obvious reason, none of which had the sort of mat for the outside of the van we had realised was needed – especially on a sandy beach. Some of them retain an old-fashioned look. 
I downloaded it and started to read – awe-inspiring. With his wife he crossed the Taygetus mountain range, the spine of the rugged and remote Mani, on foot and discovered the inaccessibility of the region and the hospitality of the people. He stopped and conversed with people in isolated villages along the way and wrote “There are times in Greece when you feel you could live with as little forethought about food as Elijah; meals appear as though laid at one’s elbow by ravens”. This echoes Neil’s childhood memories at the home of a greek school friend many years ago: lamb chops and potatoes fried in olive oil would invariably materialise in front of them not long after each expansive welcome from his mother. Since then I have discovered that Leigh Fermor lived to 96 years of age, only dying in June 2011 at his home in Kardamyli, a small town we were about to drive through obliviously:-(
The pitches are not marked out so it is airy and spacious – judicious use of the compass and we maximise the shade from the tall pines. 
We manage though and find a much wider range of dishes on the menu. Neil has been waiting to find chicken in the oven with potatoes – soft, garlicky and oily – and I go for kleftiko – stolen meat – cooked in paper with vegetables – meltingly soft. And still only about €28 with tzatziki starter and wine.
I wander out later and find a newly married couple in their wedding clothes posing for their wedding photographs. It makes for some great shots but I can’t help thinking it is tempting fate to use a shipwreck as a backdrop for a new marriage!
Since it was now quite late in the day, we decided to stay a couple of days to consider a route and hot weather was forecast so we picked a shady one anyway. This far south and east we cannot get a signal so there is no satellite-shade conflict! Our great relief at being safely ensconced in a new country had coloured our view of the site. Next day we realised it was actually a bit decrepit – not in a really bad way but tattier than many around the edges and money clearly needs spending. And the beach could do with a bit of love and attention lavishing upon it – erosion by the sea and the economy, has resulted in some decay.
So weary and hot were we that we almost decided against the walk to the museum – what a mistake that would have been! The prospect of a cafe and a cold drink tipped the balance and we sweated the heat-blasted few hundred yards to the cool, cool courtyard to find the cafe was closed:-( Mercifully the drinks machine was working and we had the necessary coins. Thanks be to Bacchus! Two freezing lemonades later we were ready to face the exhibits. The finds from the excavation of the site and the statuary are breathtaking. I’ve seen ancient statues and friezes in museums in the UK of course, but the size, quantity and quality of those broken figures and their warlike accoutrements right there in situ was an experience of a different sort.
Both moving and amazing. If you can, go. But don’t pose by the outsize statues of the male nudes – as so many visitors seem inclined to do – the caretakers don’t like it.
plumbing for draining the grey water tank, whose grip on the underside of the van had always seemed a bit shaky, had been dragging on the ground and then fell off just as we left the campsite – dumping our little remaining grey water all over the lane. Fortunately a passing camper pointed this out and there were the tap, the pipe and its bracket lying in the road 100 yards back. Why did this have to happen when we were already feeling the pressure of getting somewhere on time? Neil cursed his way round the block and back to the campsite where the very obliging manager found us four screws to replace the ones rattled loose along the way, and Neil was able to wedge the pipe back in a reasonably secure way. Unsettled but, amazingly, only twenty minutes behind schedule, we did a quick and stressed shop at Lidl and took some money out, fearing cards would not be accepted everywhere in Greece. (This proved wrong.) The anxiety wound up a notch when the first garage we tried refused to sell us any LPG – the guy claiming that the pressure used for powering vehicles was a different from that powering the cucina. We know this is not true but fridges in hot weather are a bit greedy, so it mattered quite a lot. Bugger. The next service station along just filled it up and nothing exploded. Ah well.
We had a cabin although we had hoped to use the “camping on board” facility where you stay in your van on the open deck of the ship (but with access to showers, toilets and restaurants). This is cheaper than getting a cabin and sounded fun. Due to our late booking it was not available and the other line (Minoan) offers an “All inclusive camping on board” ticket. This gets you an inside en suite cabin and thirty per cent discount in the restaurants. Not sure where the “camping part comes in. I had thought of trying to upgrade to an outside cabin but the various hassles of the day meant we were just grateful to be on board at all. The inside cabin was pleasant. It had two berths rather than bunks so no ladder climbing needed – Neil was suitably grateful – and meant it was a bit wider than the Hull-Zeebrugge cheaper cabins. Not realising that we should have collected discount vouchers from reception on boarding we headed for the restaurant and picked up unexpectedly huge portions of pasticcio and salad. The nice man on the till gave us the discount anyway and advised us to get our vouchers for breakfast. Hermann and Heike rushed in just as we were leaving – now they were looking a bit stressed:-( They were disembarking at Igoumenitsa, four hours before Patras, so had waited all this time and been one of the last five vehicles loaded, and had struggled to find a power point – none of the loading staff give any information. Barely had they showered off the heat of the day when they heard the announcement that the restaurant was closing:-(
Hurrah! Refillable gas at petrol stations in all (most) European countries (apparently Finland does not have it). All you need is a set of adaptors for the different national pumps! Of course you do – a recent fuel type, widely promoted on ecological grounds but still not standardised across co-operating countries! Three adaptors are provided with the installation in a nice little bag and these cover the whole of the EU, so clearly some standardisation efforts have been partially successful!
permanently plumbed-in 14kg tank in the existing gas locker with an external filler point in the skirt. This was a smaller capacity than we had hoped for and partly took up the space in the gas locker which we had hoped to use as a modest external storage space as we have none. We preferred the latter option though and there was still usable space for outside type stuff – the electricals, the levelling blocks, toilet chemicals, hose pipe, watering can etc. It was also half the price of the more major installation which was an unexpected bonus. The thought that we can just refill at will is bliss, although a bit anxiety provoking until we have tried it in anger in foreign lands.
France and Spain but is totally different: the maps are poor and the layout is confusing in the extreme. And it is written in Italian, which is fair enough. I won’t even start on the mindboggling number of standards for expressing geographical co-ordinates, but each book and website, and Stella, seem to use a different one! And each converter offers a subset of those available. I now have a converter that copes with five – but I don’t understand the fifth!
Esternay. It was a wet, grey day and I was so full of cold I am not sure I ventured outside the van and have only the slightest memory of what the place looked like. Fortunately Neil did venture out and took a picture – a nice town square with a boulanger opposite. At least we would be handy for fresh bread in the morning. Wrong – it was a bank holiday in France so it did not open:-( Victory in Europe day apparently. How do we always manage to get caught out like this? Thank you Esternay nonetheless.
Or the other neighbour might take pity and tie them up. He started to grow veg in the plot immediately behind ours when he retired a few years ago but gave it up as bad job. A townie all his life I think he thought it was a sort of magic that worked come rain come shine without too much hassle and was unprepared for poor crops. The underground spring should keep the toms watered as it did last year – although we only went for up to ten days at any one time then. I also got to see the irises flowering for the first time since planting them four years ago.
SnailTrails.. . . . 