Day 23 - Wednesday 16th September

Today was going to be another busy day because we wanted to visit one more monastery at Meteora and then drive to Delphi. Breakfast at the hotel started at 8am and so that’s when we got there.

The monastery we wanted to visit was the Grand Monastery. We'd known that we couldn’t go there on Tuesday because it is always closed on that day and so we went to other monasteries yesterday leaving the best to last. It opens at 9am and we arrived there before 9am hoping to beat the rush of visitors. It didn’t turn out that way because there were already five or six busloads of tourists there.

This monastery is the biggest of all the monasteries at Meteora – bigger in size, bigger museums, more exhibits, etc. Naturally it has spectacular views of the other monasteries and the surrounding countryside. It was well worth the five-hour drive from Athens.

We checked out of our hotel and set off for Delphi by 10:30am. The TomTom guided back along the roads we had travelled yesterday until we got to Lamia on the east coast at which point we headed south to Delphi.

For lunch we stopped at a roadside café next to a petrol station at about 12:30. When we walked in, it wasn’t clear what they sell. The menu was only in Greek and we soon found out that none of the staff spoke English. One of the staff was beckoning me to come into the kitchen. I thought she meant that there was someone in there who spoke English.

In the meantime one of the customers sitting at a nearby table offered some advice – he was Greek but he was the only person in the place who could speak English. He told us that the café operates on a self-service basis – you go into the kitchen and see what’s on the stove and tell them which dish you want. She pulled the lids off the various pots on the stove and then showed me what was in the oven.

I selected a meat dish from one of the pots and some chips from the oven. Suzy wasn't feeling well (tired from too much travel) and didn't order any food. The only coffee order they understood was espresso. It turned out to be a good lunch and we had conquered the language and cultural difficulties.

We reached Dephi by 3pm and the TomTom guided us to the centre of town. The hotel hadn't given us an exact address and so we spent some time driving through the streets of the town looking for it. This was very frustrating because the streets are very narrow. In some streets, we met a car coming in the opposite direction. Thankfully each car backed up until they found a parking spot so we could get past.

Eventually Suzy rang the hotel and asked for directions. This didn't help much but we eventually found it just as the hotel owner was ringing Suzy's mobile to see how we were going.

He took our bags for us and told me to drive 300m further on to find somewhere to park the car. I found a parking spot near the end of the street. It was bedlam there with tourist buses, taxis, cars, etc everywhere - mostly double or triple parked.

The hotel consists of a downstairs gift shop with rooms upstairs. It is like a B&B. The owner was very helpful. When we couldn't work out how to operate the air conditioning or the TV, he said we should have remote controls and managed to find them for us elsewhere in the building - I think his kids had them.

After settling in, we walked about 1km down the road to the historic site. There we paid an entry fee for the site and the museum. Unfortunately, it turned out that the top half of the ruins site is currently closed and so we could only inspect part of it.

The museum is quite well done. It contains various statues, ornaments and fragments that have been retrieved from the site by archaeologists. After visiting the museum, Suzy went back to the hotel while I went to see other ruin sites further down the road.

At abou 7pm, we went for dinner to a cafe that the hotel owner recommended. It has a nice view of the valley out to the sea and the sun was setting over the mountains when we arrived.

Earlier I hadn't been able to connect to the hotel's WiFi despite the help of the owner but tonight it was working brilliantly.