In the final week on Crete we organised two dinners for friends to celebrate - rather in advance - Bob's big birthday coming up in November. On both occasions the weather and shortening of daylight meant it was barely fit for fully
al fresco eating:- especially with the removal of much wind protection as documented in the preceding post! Nonetheless two good times were had by all!
A week or so before departure Ruth was being careless after a shower and fell down on slippery tiles breaking a little toe. This week she explained this to the Spanish surgeon and he said this injury is known as a "bed leg fracture" as it often caused by nocturnal stubbing of the toe
en route to the loo! The pain of walking put paid to some intended activity, and the beach had to be accessed by car for a few days. Greyrocks managed some sunbathing, but no entry to the sea, which was itself rather frisky and some windy days had shifted the sand again.
Departure day involved tight packing of Yvette, loading the bikes and then taking her for a car wash and dropping in on the
cantina to say farewells! We then drove to the Nea Chora in Chania, had lunch in the usual place, slept it off for a while on the beach and went to check in early for the 9 pm ferry and consume
gyros on the top deck before turning in!
In the morning we set off in the dark determined that we would not - yet again - miss the Corinth turn; but owing to having berthed in an unusual place we did go wrong at exactly the same inadequately marked junction! Next time, eh? Thereafter it was straightforward, except that an even greater length of the National Road was one lane each way with road improvement work. It will be great when it is finished ;- there is some impressive civil engineering around, but meantime there is the legendary Greek driving which does not observe either speed limits or overtaking bans. We suffered a lot of impatience because we did! We had a stop for breakfast and another stop at a very pleasant beach-side taverna, then hit Patras with a plan! We had hours to kill, so parked up near the marina aiming to kill a few of them in a very pleasant restaurant we know. It was permanently closed! We tried another place nearby but it was expensive and with silly WiFi arrangements, so went ridiculously early to the ferry port and enjoyed a very sunny afternoon until joining the queue, where we sat for around an hour being ignored. Never mind, we had a good cabin and adequate cheap WiFi for the voyage to Ancona, which takes around 24 hours! We also found good quiet places to sit in one of the lounges, and - for the first time - ate dinner in the
a la carte restaurant. Sheer luxury! We slept through the stop at Igoumenitsia, and so spent the day without much idea of where we were, but with a sense that we would be late arriving as we had been last time (two years ago). We were, but still beat the Minoan to the berth and disembarkation was fairly well organised, so we were out onto the
autostrada fairly quickly and into insane and aggressive Sunday evening Italian traffic!
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| This year's A to B migration |
Greyrocks' planning for the passage to Barcelona was a refinement of 2014 in that we wanted only one night in Italy, so it was booked for Emilia Romagna - giving a slightly longer drive after the ferry, and we picked a hotel with a restaurant and close to the autostrada. We found it with only one error caused by a road closure, and it looked perfect, and it was time for dinner. Best Italian: "When does the restaurant open?" Oh dear! "No restaurant tonight - it's Sunday!" Best laid plans! So we ordered a Moretti beer - something we do like about Italy - somehow ended up with the strong one and sat alone in the bar area. Out came a plate of meat and cheese with bread. We ordered another beer and out came an even larger and more varied
tabla! No need then for a restaurant!
The next day saw three serious stints of driving (in Greyrocks terms, that is!) with very good weather and less feverish road conduct by others; and this took us to the next stop of Nice. We had the printed plan and it all looked pretty easy to find the Kyriad, but we became confused by its position relative to a Leclerc supermarket and arrived frazzled after the typical navigational errors complicated by urban dual carriageways. When we had an incident with a pump at the petrol station the tension was palpable! After check-in Bob took himself off for a beer! Kyriad hotels lie on a continuum from basic to fairly swish. With this one being the cheapest chain hotels in Nice we should have predicted at which end this one would be! When we went down for dinner - almost forgetting that we had crossed a border and dinner is taken earlier in France - Ruth was the only female diner, the others being large groups of manual workers tucking in heartily from the three buffet areas. Even the main course was help-yourself with a choice of two dishes, so our plan for a
gourmet first meal in France was scuppered in favour of wholesome standard fare but washed down with nicely cheap wine!
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| 10 Grands Hommes (including one Femme!) |
And so to Lattes and an intended nine day stay without migratory driving! The weather was remarkably good for half of it. too; and Bob cycled each day. Ruth tried too on the second day, but the broken toe made pedal pushing impossible, so our trips to the sea at Palavas and Carnon were courtesy of Yvette! Another plan abandoned, but we also discovered on the first evening that a reliable restaurant helpful after a run round the Carrefour had been replaced by an Orange store and we had to resort to the Buffalo Grill! We made two tram trips into Montpellier, but didn't visit the cinema as usual because there were no VO films that appealed. One was to Odysseum - a huge shopping and entertainment mall where we found the above statuary, described thus:!
"Il y a une place dans le style d’un petit amphithéâtre où l'on peut s'asseoir et se détendre entre les achats et les activités. Il est entouré de statues de personnages célèbres de l'histoire: Mao, Nasser, Golda Meir, Gandhi, Mandela, Lénine, De Gaulle, Churchill, Roosevelt et Jaurès."
The second half of the stay saw a real deterioration in weather and we took to going out for lunch and snacking in the evening chez nous! One plan had been to share a plate of fruits de mer beside the sea in Palavas - preferably in sunshine, but by the time we got round to it indoors was the only option. The chosen plate arrived looking good, and the prawns, oysters and whelks were; but the big mussels were largely closed and those that opened contained only shriveled red vestiges. We said nothing but got out quickly very disappointed!
Other than this we very happy with our little "holiday". We had been upgraded to a very well-appointed and brand new mobile home, and the WiFi was excellent enabling us to make necessary business calls, and what turned out to be Ruth's last call to her dying father (see next post)
However there was one last - and major - change of plan to come. Staff at the campsite drew Bob's attention to a printout from the meteo, indicating that the whole area was on orange alert for torrential rain and flooding from Wednesday evening through all of Thursday, which was our planned day for driving over the Pyrenees to the next port of call. Serious deliberation followed and we eventually decided to jettison the final night in Lattes, go out for a brasserie lunch, book an additional night in Roses and make a dash for it from mid-afternoon. The sky blackened as we drove south and we were just into Spain when the storm started for us. It was indeed torrential and contributed to a missed turn close to our destination and yet another navigational mess!
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| and no better in the Girona area! |
We arrived in Roses in the middle of a huge downpour, and when we wanted to go out to eat we were lent a large umbrella by the hotel and got to one of the places we know as quickly as knees and toes would allow! It poured all night and we heard that at least one person died in the storms of the region. Through Thursday and part of Friday we dodged rain - often in bars - and avoided huge puddles, but then the sun came out beautifully and we realised once again what a very nice place it is - particularly its wide prom with plenty of space for cyclists. We took Yvette for a thorough waxing before driving on the Sunday morning to Girona to settle her for the winter. We then took the two hour coach journey to Barcelona airport and sailed through all formalities and onto a problem-free (subsidised) Vueling flight back to Fraggle Rock, which we had left just over six months earlier!
