Small, vulnerable,
Cyclists ride alongside cars,
Blazing speeds: too much.
Well, although we woke up at the prescribed time (Evan moaning about his hangover, I prodding him to move), we didn't make it out of Larisa before 1030. We meandered through the town's extensive parkland to a café, where we sat to enjoy our morning caffeine and write some blog posts. It's hard to catch up on these things now... since we finished our "distance goal" at Athens, we feel like this trip is more and more procedural. It's unfortunate, I know, but we're getting... gasp... homesick!
We managed to find our way out of town before 11h, which is good, I suppose (some cities are extremely navigationally challenging...). Our crappy Greek map shows that there's no way along the coast to Katerini that doesn't take the motorway. Google Maps shows that there's no way along the coast to Katerini that doesn't take the motorway. Both seem to indicate that we should ride an additional 30km or so over mountains to make it. But we didn't believe them, so we headed to the coast.
Out of Larisa, we took a smaller highway for 20km or so, then accidentally merged onto the motorway. Well, no problem, we've done this before; in fact, the larger shoulder on these routes makes us feel safer than the occasionally nonexistant shoulder on the smaller roads. We went along at a good clip (it's a wonderfully-paved road, after all) for 4km and took the first exit, which required passing a toll booth.
Well, there's no toll listed for bicycles. The smallest vehicle that must pay is a scooter, so the woman behind the counter in the booth waved us through with a puzzled look on her face. Hm. We continued along some smaller service roads that followed the motorway closely, and we noted with interest that there were periodic signs along the larger road indicating its status: motorway, not motorway, motorway, not motorway. What kind of road is this?
We had to take it a few times, it's true. Google Maps and our map were correct: there's no way to avoid that road-path. There are ways to avoid the tolls, which we did with some crafty farmland dodges. When we saw a sign indicating a toll coming up, we dodged out a couple roads and headed north on something smaller, veering back towards the main road after we felt we'd gone a sufficient distance. It was easy going, for the most part, excepting those tedious gravel roads along the train line... oh well.
We paused for lunch at the bottom of a gorgeous mountain valley. The "motorway" had been following it for some time, and when it finally dumped out of the mountains and into the beach area, we found an astonishingly beautiful park where a man and his son stood fishing at the river. We pondered them as we ate our delicious rice-mushroom-parmesan leftovers.
When we made it to Katerini after some hours of riding (much of it was tedious, due to the narrowness of the shoulder and the noise of passing cars which made it difficult to keep up conversations), we noted that everything seemed closed. A festival? What's up? Well, we stopped in a café to use some Wifi and have a coffee.
Opening the laptop revealed to us that it was, in fact, Sunday. We'd been labouring under the assumption that it was Saturday; I guess I fudged the date on our mobile when I was changing the time for DST last week. Well, crap. We realised we'd have to go out for gyros: not a bad fate, considering their relative quality here. :)
While we sat around in the café, the thoughtful bartender sent a man to us with shots on the house. We still aren't sure what they were, exactly, but they reminded us a lot of Gammeldansk -- that stuff we enjoyed overmuch with Birthe and Ole in Odense, Danmark. Perhaps that's what they were. Anyway, we wondered again about our appearance: do we look like folks who need a drink? This was the second time in two days we'd been treated...
We took just a short stop in a gyro shop to sate our hunger. From there, we headed on in a direction we thought was sane in order to find a campsite. We had no navigational sense by this point.. once the sun has set, we can't be sure what direction we're going (I think we left our compass back at that farm in Valencia so long ago). We figured we'd be able to find signs in the morning.
So, we're parked in another construction area for the night. The road that comes up to the site has been torn up and is evidently slated for improvement, but for now it's entirely impassible. We have as neighbours a partially-constructed apartment complex, a fenced grassy field containing some construction equipment, and a used car lot. I think no one will bother us here. I hope not: we've got to watch Legend tonight!