Siatista & Grevena -Day 17

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Since we were in Santorini; Steve has been talking about going to Chalkidiki to visit his cousin Stergios, who works at a restaurant in Pefkochori, a beach resort area. The original plan was to go straight to Chalkidiki from the airport in Salonika, which would have made perfect sense since the airport is actually on the peninsula of Chalkidiki . Chalkidiki is a peninsula that resembles a hand with three ‘fingers’. The ‘fingers’ are named Kassandra, Sithonia and Athos from bottom to top. Kassandra is the most developed and is where Steve’s cousin is for the summer and Athos is where Mt Athos and all the monasteries are (off limits to women and non Orthodox men). However when this was first brought up, Xristos decided that we should wait until the weekend, so he and his wife could come with us. So we fell in with that plan, thinking that we could meet up with Steve B. as well and have a bunch of cousins at the beach. Well, things didn’t go as planned (shocking!) and Xristos couldn’t get time off from work, so we decided to go anyway. Magda and Steve B's mom wanted to go with us as well, which meant figuring out a way to get the Vitara since we would need 2 cars. Okay this took some serious organizing as we didn’t even have a place to stay!

Today we had wanted to take it kind of easy, but Magda made plans for us to go to her Cousin's house for lunch in Siatista. Magda looked settled in for visit, so we left her there after we were there for a couple of hours and went to use the internet café at the top of their street. We searched the internet for a hotel in Pefkochori (which means pine village) for the weekend. The plan is now to stay in Pefkochori for 3 nights, Friday through Monday. We found several in the price range of 20 to 30 Euros per person per night. Not bad! We also wanted to make sure that the place we stayed had a pool and air conditioning. We ended up booking 2 rooms at the Ioli Village at a total of $210 Euros for each room for the 3 nights. We went back to get Magda and say farewell.

When we got back to Mikrokastro, we walked to a store called Manolis for cold soda and some snacks. We tried to nap, but it was way to hot. Temperatures are still averaging about 36-38 Celsius. We went to Xristos' to shower (Woo hoo, Cleanliness!!) and get ready for dinner. We all drove to Grevena to have dinner with Xristos, his Kaliope and their daughter at ‘The Chicken of Taki’ which was the ‘best chicken place in Grevena’. The roasted chicken was awesome! We also had village salad, tzatziki and potatoes. For desert we had halava, which are grain cakes with sugar syrup, they were really tasty.

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