If it’s Tuesday it must be Greece…

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It sure went by in a blur. Here we are already in Italy, getting ready to leave for France tomorrow.

Cycling Distances:
Piraeus to campground 30 km east of Korinth 55 km
Camp to Korinth 30 km
Korinth to Akarta Beach 65 km
Akarta Beach to Rio 63 km
Rio to Patras 12 km

Even on a trip of this extended length there are sites we miss and places we’d like to linger but we manage to run out of time. Greece and Italy are getting short shrift this trip as we refuse to change our relaxed pace and we are restricted to 90 days in Europe as a result of the Schengen visa. Given we have rented a place in France for a month and that when we conceived the European part of this trip it was to be about cycling in France, we have missed much of Greece and will miss much of Italy to make sure we get that time in France.

So we are following the first rule of travel – always tell yourself you will be back. “Trip of a lifetime,” a phrase my Mom is very fond of, is great for pumping up the adrenaline about a trip but ultimately relaxed travel is the key to experiencing a destination rather than ‘doing’ it.

So. I loved what little we saw of Greece. We divided our time between Samos and Korinth.

Ian’s suggestion to ‘take a week off’ in Samos met with no argument from me as we wanted to unpack our bags for an entire week, in a place we actually planned to stop (rather than unplanned extensions because I was sick). Samos is one of Greece’s most easterly islands; it is closer to Turkey than it is to the Greek mainland.

We took a 90 minute ferry from Kusadasi and landed in the port of Samos.

We rode a pretty 2 km road out of town and wound our way up a cliff to the Scorpios Apartments. We rolled our bikes through the bougainvillea covered gate and admired the stone floors of the whitewashed lobby and then stopped to admire the pool, and the stunning view of the Aegean from the pool deck. We loved the place even before we entered the apartment and discovered a balcony with the same stunning view and a small kitchen. I noticed a giant rosemary bush on the grounds and after a trip to town to provision I was humming away to music playing on our ipad as I marinated chicken legs in Samos white wine, rosemary and capers and then baked them basting them with honey. We ate them with rosemary and garlic mashed potatoes, drinking white wine on the balcony watching the waves crash onto a cliffside far below. Heaven.

We used booking.com to make our reservation just outside of high season and thought 40 euros a night was an absolute steal. The owner Nansy is an artist and her work is displayed throughout the hotel and we appreciated her artistic touch noticeable throughout the property.

Nansy recommended that we rent a car to tour the island and gave us a great itinerary. We found a car down the road for 28 euros a day including insurance. We drove to Pythagoria (the hometown of Pythagoras — yes responsible for the Pythagorean theorem on right-angled triangles). The town hosts a small boat harbor for people cruising ‘the med’ and we had a nice seaside moussaka lunch watching people back in and do ‘the med tie’ which involves tying up the stern of the boat and throwing an anchor down off the bow. We also drove the narrow winding mountain road up a few hundred metres to the town of Manolatas. The houses and shops are all built on steep slopes on top of the mountain and we enjoyed walking the stone streets and admiring the views and a beautiful little chapel and bell tower.

We spent 9 days on Samos and between our day of touring by car, checking out beautiful beaches, hanging by the pool, visiting Samos town itself (there is a good archaeological museum as well as a wine museum which includes wine tasting – Samos is famous for making great dessert wine using muscat grapes), we were not bored.

From Samos we took a ferry to Piraeus, the main port for the city of Athens. We took NEL lines, a little bit of a rust bucket but very affordable at 80 euros each for a cabin and a 16 hour journey. The cabin was clean and just as nice as the one we had on the more expensive Superfast ferry line which we took from Patras Greece to Ancona Italy – (although the Superfast ship was a very luxurious new boat with a pool).

We landed in Piraeus and it was Ian’s experience from 20 years ago where he cycled the same route in reverse that helped us navigate to the ferry terminal for Salamis island (about 10 kms away from the port). We rode across Salamis Island (12 km) and onto another ferry to get us to the mainland, now the Peloponnesus peninsula. This shaved off a significant chunk of heavy traffic highway riding and the ride across the island was quite lovely. From that ferry landing, we followed Ian’s instincts to get us to highway 8 (the old national road) and then were very happy to follow that all the way along the coast, eventually to Patras.

It took us a few days to get across the peninsula to Patras, with a longish stop at Korinth.

Korinth is home to the Korinth canal (very narrow and steep canal that allows boats to get from the Gulf of Corinth to the Aegean without a big detour around south of Greece.)

We stopped at the canal enroute to the Blue Dolphin campground, close to the ancient city of Corinth. (Corinth is spelled both ways with a C or a K).

We almost gave ancient Corinth a miss – if Ian had not made the connection with Corinthians and St. Paul we may have just kept barreling across Greece. As it was, I spent the night before we checked out the ruins reading up on St. Paul.

This is where slow travel really pays off – exploring the ruin sites at a leisurely pace and cycling to them enhances my experience of actually feeling the history. I walked around that ruin site imagining Paul walking the same ancient road (the road through the old town is still partially intact); in my mind’s eye I watched him eating in one of the restaurants, looking up at the acropolis, buying olives and wine in a shop, (they had rows of shops along the main road through town and there are stone remains of the shop buildings) and writing his epistles to the Corinthians. He became a man for me, a historical figure not so far removed in time as he had been the day before for me, and this took him out of the mythical category he was filed under in my brain. That led to really trying to understand his experience and once again crawl my way through Catholic theology trying to understand what it was I was really supposed to believe when I was a churchgoer as a child.

Sure enough I discovered a contradiction that I am still puzzling over – St. Paul was very clear that he believed in the resurrection of Christ in a literal way. The current pope does not. So here I am feeling vindicated again — all those years in catechism class and hours spent in mass and I could never get a straight answer on theology questions and fought bitterly about being forced to believe in something I could not understand. (I gave up God when I gave up Santa Claus as it was about then that my brain started rejecting imaginary creatures of all kinds and none of the answers I got about what God is made any sense to me at that time.)

I have a much more sophisticated idea about what God is now and in very minor circles might be considered agnostic because I can come up with definitions that allow me to say “I believe under certain definitions.” In most circles I would be considered an atheist because I reject what I have come to believe is the common conception of God and I believe that conception is unsophisticated and wrong. But hey, not to pick on Catholics — they are not the only people confused in their theology – this is true of all major religions but I like to find evidence to back up this theory I have.

And there you have it, what I learned on my summer vacation and I am inspired to read on. Thank you St. Paul and ancient Corinth…

Well. Back to modern-day Greece…and then we cycled back to the campground….We spent four nights at the campground, partly so we could do laundry and take a day to see the ruins, also because we met a British couple there named Ian and Sue and so we had to stay up late and drink gallons of wine with them, delaying our departure by yet another day…

The ride from Corinth to Patras took three days. The first day was beautiful along the old national road which parallels the highway. It was Sunday, there was virtually no traffic and we were treated to ocean views the whole way. The only challenge was a very strong headwind that kept us pedaling hard the entire ride. Then next day we rode from Akarta Beach where we had camped to Rio which is just outside of Patras; there we found a great hotel for 65 Euros a night that included breakfast and had a lovely beachside bar where we could say goodbye to Greece at sunset.

We rode 12 kms to Patras the next morning, found a ferry booking company and two hours later we were on the Superfast ferry to Ancona, a 20 some hour ride that was very luxurious.

Ancona itself is a dirty little port town with nothing to recommend it but we stayed overnight near the train station and then cycled out to the airport the next day to pick up a rental car and then whizzed across the entire country to Pisa, bikes and panniers in the hatchback. We admired Tuscany as we drove through, and reminded ourselves of other times we’d been in Florence and told ourselves we would be back one day as we negotiated out of central Florence in rush hour through a traffic jam…

And here we are in Pisa…whew….off to France tomorrow.

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