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Published: September 20th 2013
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Thessaloniki to Delphi - Day 13 Friday 20th September Thessaloniki is knee deep in cars. If ever you have been to Amsterdam and seen how the bikes are joined 10 deep from a fence and you wonder how the owner of bike number 1 can retrieve it... then imagine the same with cars. They are parked everywhere and never seem to move. People park at 90 degrees to the pavement with half the car on the pavement. Any bit of vacant road is parked upon. Areas with wide angles and spare bits of concrete are chocker full of cars. When you get to a junction, you don't know which lanes are waiting for traffic lights or just parked. People just give up on the rigid traffic and leave their cars at the point of just having had too much of it all.
It's really hard to know which way to turn in a car because you don't know what's going to move until it's too late, so I let Glyn drive us out of Thessaloniki. (Glyn - thanks!) Our next destination was Delphi which was a very long drive away, but an easy one as it was on
major roads. But easy roads means LOTS of tolls. I'm not sure just how many tolls, but Glyn showed me a fist full of toll receipts at the end of our four and a half hour journey south. (Glyn - and think of how much it costs too!)
Our hotel in Delphi is one of the best of our trip which is cool because it is the last. It's our first hotel with a great view from our room and from it I saw our first long haired cat. This one deffo is not a stray as it had a collar.
Hotel Orfeas is friendly, pleasant and walking distance from the Ancient Delphi Site. The people that work here (I think they are family) speak French as a second language more than English, but I realised I knew enough French to get me by after asking how far to the ancient Site.
So we walked to Ancient Delphi which may be my favourite Ancient Site of the trip.... Why? Is it because.....
A) There were not that many tourists? Well yes that helped, but this may have been due to us being there later in
the day.
B) I was greeted at the entrance by two friendly kittens? One of the little tabbies let me pick it up and purred, so yes this was a bonus.
C) There were a good few toilet facilities and none of them down lots of steps when you were shattered already? This certainly was a selling point, so many of the sites in Greece had no loo at all and when you've drank too much water, it gets a bit much.
D) It was warm and breezy? This without a doubt makes walking around ancient sites on steeps hills a lot more fun than when you are stumbling uphill on loose rocks in searing heat that makes you dream of drizzly grey days on Stoke railway station.
E) There was enough of it intact to make it interesting? Yes, that was a big pull, even Glyn appreciated the Stadium, which after Olympia's effort was a sure bonus.
Yes we both really enjoyed Delphi. There was a small flurry of rain and it got a bit windy at one point, I thought we were in for a storm but it blew
away and the sun poured over us again.
We walked through the small town and had a meal with a lovely tom cat, then bought the mementos and pressies for family that we've been meaning to for a while now. We even got stamps for the few postcards we have written!
Our last night was spent on our warm balcony watching the sun go down on the Gulf of Corinth with a beer and a coke.
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