Our celebration has been premature, for although we have agreed that our distance goal is met there still remains the matter of a flight from Istanbul to attend to, and there are but three weeks left to get there. It doesn't help that, having pronounced this goal met, we feel as though the trip is over and are consequently much less thrilled about the prospect of continuing on 1200km further in mid-fall. We hear the nighttime temperature dips to 2 degrees up in Thessaloniki...
...and, to add to our inertial laziness, we must pack and replace our tyres before going anywhere. We instead decide to start off the day by getting up at 0900, lumbering out to get food, and checking our various Internets; only once this is done do we gather up our things, pull out the tools, pop the wheels off, deflate the inner tubes, remove the old tyres, replace them with the new tyres, inflate the inner tubes, reattach the wheels, move our bags and bikes downstairs, reload the pannier racks, bike down for coffee and lunch (since it is now 1200!), and - finally, four slow hours after getting our trip-weary bodies out of that nice warm bed - head out on the week-long ride to Thessaloniki. And we are not altogether successful in that: after the initial climb out of Iraklio, we spend several minutes navigating the insanely tight security at a local bank - there are two doors activated only by manually paging the desk with a button next to the handle, after which you must look into a security camera and wait for permission to enter - just to unsuccessfully ask for directions. We then head up through some random suburbs, getting lost in the byzantine roads whose layout is complicated by the small matter of a sizeable ravine nearby, and eventually resign ourselves to taking the motorway service roads. Another 10km of slogging alongside the smog generation machine to our immediate left, and then we decide to take a turnoff towards a town whose name we recognize from our admittedly terrible map. We stop to get our tires pumped at the one bike shop we run into, then speed off on our newly inflated tires down the hill - only to meet a sign to Athens further down, causing much confusion. To correct this, we make a turn back towards the highway and discover that we have followed a 20km loop back to a turnoff we should have taken but previously rejected as heading in the wrong direction. We sigh, take the correct turnoff, and are immediately dropping down into the ravine before climbing the other side...
...and the road continues on to climb up this mountain through some national park, pushing us temporally ever towards twilight. It is approaching sunset by the time we crest the peak, and the cold does not help; just at the start of the downhill, we succumb and pull out everything warm we can find, throwing it on to ward off the cold - and we find that here, sitting on the mountainside, we are compelled to talk about the impending threat of real life. For nearly six months now we have been travelling; we have neglected hygiene far more than modern urban life will usually permit, have slept most our nights under two flimsy (yet, thankfully, waterproof) sheets of orange fabric and a pair of down sleeping bags, have weathered heat and wind and rain and cold. Soon it will all end; we will return to family and friends, I to my Silicon Valley full-time job and Valkyrie to the rigours of graduate school applications, and we will scarcely have rest before setting out across the US for San Francisco - no time to breathe, to think over the last few months and ask the essential questions. Why did we do this? Why have we set aside six months of our lives, six months away from many luxuries and conveniences, away from promising futures in industry and academia to, as one might unceremoniously put it, bum around Europe? What have we learned that made it worthwhile? We had each expected some profound revelation, some life-changing epiphany that would clear away the mental cobwebs and light a shining clear path to follow - but instead we have these quiet realizations, little bits of wisdom and dedication and character-building suffering collected at often great cost in time and effort and morale and occasionally even hard cash, so that we must try still harder to extract and distill this wisdom into something we can apply to the challenges awaiting us back across the Atlantic...
...but now it is truly getting dark, and home seems far off compared to the more immediate requirements: food, water, shelter. We descend into the towns below, stopping at the nearest market for dinner ingredients on our way to search for a campsite. The first site we check is unsuitable, full of long grass and hastily discarded trash - but the second, an abandoned lot wedged between a pair of car mechanics (or something of that sort; we cannot make out their purpose in the dim light of the streetlamps), will suffice. We set the stove, whip up a passable orzo salad, drink our ritual wine, watch MacGyver until we drift off into sleep...