Day 5
Leaving
One of the biggest bummers of travelling is, well, the travelling. I mean the mucking around in actually getting to the place you want to go to. We were smart/lucky that on this short trip, rather than burning a day at each end, we had early flights to get to Greece and late afternoon flights going home, so we got as close to five days out of a four day trip as we could.
Without going into all the boring logistics, we needed to be at the airport by about 4 p.m.. This gave us almost a full day to do the two hours between Arachova and Athens airport.
First stop was the city of Livadia. After 4 days of villages of different sizes, we drove through the downtown and saw a lively modern city, which to our surprise, had open shops at 10 a.m. Livadia is a little bit schizophrenic, though. For all its size and modernity, it also has an old town, with a waterfall, stream, waterwheel, an ancient 13th century castle, a quaint pedestrian street and a really nice vibe. We may have been able to spend a little longer in this part of town had our navigator navigated a bit better, or used his app a bit differently, or another navigation app. In any case the 5 minute journey uptown took about twenty, but the journey is half the fun. Maybe. But not in this case.
Eventually we arrived and shpatzed around the village part of town, walked up to the waterfall, had coffee (of course) overlooking the stream and had an all-round jolly time. We came upon an amphitheater which somehow took us back 48 years to 1977, (yes, really) to the school play that Yoni directed and we all had parts in. And we all remembered a few lines of the play and re-enacted them on the amphitheater stage. I can’t help but to reflect on the fact that we have been friends for 50 years. I can’t overstate what a true privilege it is to be able to travel far and wide with people I have known almost my entire life. Its value is quite literally, immeasurable.
We were flying out around six p.m. and needed to eat something along the way. We found a local bakery that really did have fresh and good pastries, unlike on the first day, and returned to the car to head off to the airport. We’ll find a nice picnic table in a park or forest en route, we thought. Trouble is it’s highway all the way to Athens and the airport and we could see nowhere that looked even vaguely suitable to plonk ourselves down and have our final carbs for the trip. In the end we took a random exit that brought us to an un-noteable industrial area, full of factories and warehouses. A right hand turn led us to more factories, another right, even more factories, until we found the only patch of grass in the entire area. True, this particular patch of grass was behind a large rubbish bin full of corrugated cardboard. Next to the dumpster was a pile of scorched earth with olive branches, freshly pruned, waiting to make the spot even more scorched. After three right hand turns, we were above the highway we had come off, so we had the sweet sound of rushing cars and honking trunks, together with the scent of eau de petrol fumes to accompany our lunch. But still, we were sitting on grass, the company was good and the pastries fresh and tasty. Just before we were about to eat, a man, I assume the factory foreman, with a burly bouncer-looking enforcer behind him, came through the factory gate and if he’d spoken English, would have said something along the lines of “what the fuck are you doing here?”. Our reply of “Just eating lunch” was met with bemused skepticism, and I can just imagine the conversation between Mr and Mrs foreman when he arrived home from work.
“How was your day, darling?”
“Usual”, Mr foreman would reply “other than we had a bunch of tourists using the garbage dump outside the factory as a picnic ground. They’re either fucking idiots or very surreptitious industrial spies. I’m going with the fucking idiots theory”
And so it was, our first meal in Greece was leaning against a ramp outside an abandoned shop and our last meal behind a dumpster overlooking a highway. Hmm.
Both will surely go into our long list of travels lore. As will so many other things we did on this trip.