Here is how the planned route looks from my village.
I am heading back to England on tomorrow evening's ferry, so today was my last chance for a ride. I had looked with binoculars at the mountain and thought I could see tracks that went to about 2,000 metres, so planned to explore those.
Here is how the planned route looks from my village.
I had an amazing day - I hope the photos do it justice, For me beauty is full of sadness these days, but I think maybe it always has a touch of that. Anyway, today was a beautiful day.
The weather was undergoing a change today and forecast to be colder. As I set out, this is what the mountains looked like. Zeus was born up there - was someone trying to tell me something?.
In between the showers, the light was amazing on the way up.This church is a landmark when you look up to the mountains from from back in the village.
That's encouraging - 14km to the top. What it doesn't mention is that the height difference is 1900 metres.
The showers looked to have passed for a while, but it was windy, even amongst the trees and the track was rough and steep. I'm not strong enough to power through this for kilometres on end, so I walked quite a bit rather than risk losing traction, losing the good line and falling off, especially as the gusts of wind were throwing me all over the place.
Sometimes, it's difficult to get the self-timer set up right on the camera. I think the bike looks good though - and those are good legs!.
Those villages way below are the mountain villages that seem high when I ride through them normally.
Looking across to the Amari valley. You can see from the tree in the foreground that it's a pretty windy place.
This is looking back down to the church from the earlier picture. which is perched on the outcrop L centre.
Almost up to the tree line.
my bike has a rest.
It keeps on going up.
The sky stayed clear but there were always big shower clouds around and the wind was getting even stronger.
It was incredibly beautiful, but I was very aware of how remote I was on my own and the wind was now quite scary on the exposed slopes. I stopped to have a think about how much further to go and it was obvious that here was far enough. 1670 metres. The track above looked so inviting and more rideable than what I had done so far, but the wind was now really scary and there were still squall clouds about, so I turned back. Along with deciding never to watch England play football again, this is one of my more sensible decisions.
The way down.
it kept going down.
And down.
And down.
I went very slowly - it would have been lovely to fly down, but I'm a very sensible man - AND I wore my helmet.
When I got back down to civilisation at about 600 metres, I stopped and took this picture looking back up. I was quite disorientated from the descent, cold and braking. You can see the hairpins through the trees - I think it's great to look at this and think, " but I was way above the treeline" - there was still a good bit to go though - next year!.
Because I had come back down early, I had time to visit this taverna for a beautiful Cretan ommellette with "miso kilo krasi kochino" - you can guess! I learnt this "camera obscura" photography technique from friends of mine - I remembered to turn the flash off though!.